The government will continue to work closely with heritage groups on ways to protect Ellison Building. Source
The North-South Corridor’s (NSC) original alignment would have affected more buildings, including Rex Cinema and several shophouse units at Ellison Building, revealed Senior Minister of State for National Development Desmond Lee in Parliament on Tuesday (8 November).
But since the government recognised the heritage value of Rex Cinema and Ellison Building, agencies carried out detailed engineering studies to further minimise the impact on the said buildings.
“Indeed, the agencies worked very hard to carry out extensive studies and eventually managed to develop a solution for the NSC to avoid Rex Cinema completely.
“However, given the very tight space in the Bukit Timah Road corridor, the NSC alignment will not be able to avoid Ellison Building entirely, which, unlike Rex Cinema, stands much closer to the road carriageway,” said Lee in response to a query from MP Kok Heng Leun.
Nonetheless, the results of the engineering studies shows that the impact on Ellison Building can be “reduced to one corner shophouse unit, instead of a larger portion of the entire building”.
With this, the LTA and the URA have sought the views of heritage groups on how to better protect Ellison Building once construction work on the NSC begins.
“There have been two rounds of discussion thus far, which centred on possible mitigating measures to protect the building during the construction of the NSC. In taking this forward, LTA’s conservation consultant will explore various mitigating measures in detail as part of the study on Ellison Building,” shared Lee.
“URA and LTA will continue to work closely with the heritage groups and the heritage community of Singapore on the construction methods to protect Ellison Building, as well as the measures that should be taken to preserve the heritage and history of the site.”
The government will finalise its implementation plans following the conclusion of the discussions, said Lee.
Spanning 21 km, the NSC will incorporate bus lanes, cycling trunk routes and an expressway that runs elevated as well as underground. Once completed, the transport corridor will connect the residential estates in the North such as Woodlands, Sembawang, Yishun, Ang Mo Kio, Bishan and Toa Payoh to the city centre.
Romesh Navaratnarajah, Senior Editor at PropertyGuru, edited this story. To contact him about this or other stories, email romesh@propertyguru.com.sg
