Alert 5

By the time the sun climbs over the trees at 398 Piccadilly, the queue at Boh Geh Uncle Canteen has already formed. Taxi drivers nursing their kopi-o. Aerospace engineers from the nearby industrial park grabbing a plate of economical noodles before their shift. Cyclists resting mid-loop around Lower Seletar Reservoir. It is an unremarkable weekday morning scene that has repeated itself, with only minor variations, for 57 years.

After this month, it will not repeat again. On Sept. 18, the canteen — more formally known as Canteen 398, and affectionately as “Boh Geh Uncle Canteen” after its toothless, ever-smiling owner Mr William Toh — serves its last cup of coffee. The next day, the doors close for good. In a handwritten notice pinned to the wall, the owners thanked customers “for all your support all these years” and said they were ready, after nearly six decades, to retire.

On its surface, it reads like any number of old-school eatery closures that have become a familiar part of Singapore’s redevelopment story. But Boh Geh Uncle Canteen carries a distinction that outlasts its cai png and curry potato: it began life not as a coffeeshop at all, but as a British military mess hall — and it is understood to be the last original RAF Seletar-era building still running, day to day, in its original function. Everything else the Royal Air Force (RAF) left behind in this corner of Singapore has since become a museum piece, a conserved façade, or a company logo. The canteen alone kept serving food, in the same compound, without interruption, since 1969.

An airbase born of empire

The story of what would become Seletar begins in the early 1920s, when swampy land in Singapore’s north was earmarked for an RAF airfield and flying-boat base. The first aircraft touched down in February 1928, and RAF Seletar was formally opened on Jan. 1, 1930, becoming the RAF’s first permanent airbase in the region and, briefly, Singapore’s only civil airport until Kallang opened in 1937. Its glamour — pioneering aviators like Amy Johnson passed through — gave way to war: Seletar was among the first targets struck when Japan invaded Malaya in December 1941, fell with the rest of Singapore in February 1942, and returned to RAF control only in 1946.

Sgt Breeze, Royal Air Force (RAF) official photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The post-war decades saw Seletar settle into a quieter, longer institutional life: a garrison town in miniature, with barracks, workshops, a hospital, a golf course, and streets that still bear the names of London thoroughfares — Oxford Street, Park Lane, Hyde Park Gate. Rows of black-and-white bungalows, built for officers and their families, gave the base a distinctly English suburban character transplanted onto equatorial soil. It was in this landscape of empire in its late, administrative phase that Canteen 398 opened in 1969, serving as a corporal’s mess for British army personnel stationed there.

The long withdrawal

Seletar’s military chapter, like Britain’s presence east of Suez more broadly, ended not with drama but with paperwork. Flying operations at the station effectively ceased in March 1969. Administrative control passed to Singapore’s Department of Civil Aviation in April 1970, and the RAF station formally closed at the end of March 1971 — the culmination of Britain’s broader withdrawal of forces from Singapore and Malaysia, a decision driven by post-war economic retrenchment rather than any single crisis.

What followed was a split inheritance. The eastern portion of the old base passed to Singapore’s own defence establishment, becoming Seletar Camp under the Singapore Armed Forces — the very corporal’s mess that would become Boh Geh Uncle Canteen found itself absorbed into this transition, continuing to feed personnel under a different flag. The western side, meanwhile, remained aviation-focused and evolved into what is today Seletar Airport, Singapore’s second civil airfield.

The handover was, in fact, already under way before the RAF formally departed. On Jun. 1, 1970, the Singapore Air Defence Command — precursor to today’s Republic of Singapore Air Force (RSAF) — stood up its 160 Squadron at Seletar East Camp, the country’s first and longest-serving air defence unit. Equipped that same year with 24 Oerlikon 35mm anti-aircraft guns, the squadron took over Block 450, a barracks built by the RAF in 1930, as its operational home. Seletar’s air defence, in fact, changed hands twice over: RAF 65 Squadron, which had operated the base’s Bloodhound Mk II surface-to-air missiles since 1964, stood down and handed its role to Singapore’s fledgling air defence force in 1971, and the missiles themselves were passed on to what became 170 Battalion, Singapore Artillery, which received refurbished Bloodhound units from the RAF and brought the system to full operational status in 1974. For more than three decades, the old imperial airbase and the fledgling national air force overlapped on the same patch of ground, one handing duties to the other, gun emplacement and missile battery at a time.

Seletar’s aviation identity, too, carried over rather than ending. It was here, with RAF instructors and borrowed Cessnas, that the Singapore Air Defence Command set up its very first Flying Training School in 1968 — meaning the country’s own air force learned to fly on the same runway the RAF had used since 1928. That lineage continued for decades: 150 Squadron flew the Italian-built SF260 basic trainer out of Seletar from the early 1970s until roughly 1995, after which the remaining aircraft were passed to an Air Grading Flight for initial pilot screening, before the type was finally retired in 1999 and the RSAF’s ab initio training moved overseas, to Tamworth in Australia. Fixed-wing training was not the only kind: 124 Squadron, tasked with the RSAF’s Rotary Wing Course, operated the EC120B Colibri light helicopter out of Seletar for several, training successive batches of helicopter pilots. Singapore’s air force, in a real sense, learned to fly, on wings and on rotors alike, at Seletar, long before its training moved elsewhere.

For decades after the British left, much of the former base drifted into a kind of suspended animation: bungalows leased out to expatriates and locals, hangars used for storage, the old runway ticking along with light aircraft traffic, while the rest of Singapore transformed around it.

What survives, and how

Seletar’s more recent history has been one of curated revival, not neglect. From the mid-2000s, JTC Corporation redeveloped much of the area into Seletar Aerospace Park; of the roughly 378 colonial-era bungalows once on site, over 150 had already been demolished, and some 200 of the rest were conserved as offices, restaurants and homes. The bungalows survive, but as cafés now, not quarters.

Block 450 — 160 Squadron’s old barracks, barely 350 metres from 398 Piccadilly — tells a similar story on the military side. The squadron moved out in 2002, and the building was later gazetted for conservation, a heritage storyboard now standing where anti-aircraft crews once mustered. Many of those servicemen, by all accounts, remember Boh Geh Uncle Canteen not as an RAF relic but simply as the canteen down the road from camp. Seletar Camp itself remains a working army base today, home to the 35th Battalion, Singapore Combat Engineers — but that is continuity of land use, not of any RAF-era structure, nearly all of which have since been demolished, redeveloped, or retired into conservation like Block 450.

Against that backdrop, Boh Geh Uncle Canteen occupied a stranger, more precarious kind of survival: never gazetted, never restored, just a building that kept doing its original job, uninterrupted, for half a century. Of everything the RAF put up at Seletar, it appears to be the only structure still standing and still functioning as intended — a place where people who work nearby come to eat, exactly as corporals once did.

An ending without ceremony

The taxi drivers and aerospace workers who filled its tables this month will have to find somewhere else for their morning kopi. So too will the former servicemen who once knew the place well: men from 160 and 170 Squadron who ate there during their years at Seletar, and combat engineers who have continued to drop by, whether on active duty or back for reservist training, long after the anti-aircraft guns and missile batteries were gone.

But something is quietly closing off with it. RAF Seletar’s physical legacy will go on being visible in Singapore for years yet — in a conserved bungalow’s timber shutters, in a street sign reading “Lambeth Walk,” in the low drone of light aircraft over the reservoir. What disappears with Boh Geh Uncle Canteen is something less tangible and harder to conserve: continuity itself, the thread of a place still being used the way it was built to be used, undisturbed by seven decades of empire’s end, national independence, and urban reinvention. When its last plate is served on 18 September, that thread — remarkably, improbably, 57 years long — finally breaks.