A 1950s garden estate
Serangoon Gardens was laid out in the 1950s by the Serangoon Garden Estate Company, founded by the British developer Steven Charles Macey; by 1954 about a thousand houses had been built. Its forty-odd English road names — Kensington Park Road, Burghley Drive, Tavistock Avenue — reflect the background of the estate’s founders and planners, and many early residents were British servicemen and their families. Older residents still call it Ang Sar Lee, Hokkien for “red zinc”, after the roofs of its first houses.
The estate radiates from Serangoon Garden Circus. Most of it is landed — terraces, semi-detached houses and bungalows — so there are few management corporations inside it; the strata developments listed here sit mainly on its edges.
Getting around
There is no MRT station inside the estate. Lorong Chuan on the Circle Line is about 1.3 km away and Serangoon, an interchange of the North East and Circle Lines, about 1.4 km. The Cross Island Line’s first phase, due around 2030, includes a station on Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3 at Tavistock Avenue (working name Tavistock), at the edge of the estate.
Everyday amenities
- Chomp Chomp Food Centre on Kensington Park Road, one of Singapore’s best-known evening hawker centres.
- Serangoon Garden Market for the wet market and food centre.
- myVillage on Maju Avenue, just off the Circus, and the cafés and restaurants around the roundabout.
- Serangoon Gardens Country Club on Kensington Park Road, and the squash and tennis centre on Burghley Drive.
Who manages the buildings here
The condominiums around the estate are split among several agents — Ocean IFM manages the most, followed by Raffles Strata Management — and a quarter have no managing agent on record.
What to have ready
The management office will ask for the MCST number and your unit. Parking around the Circus fills up in the evenings when Chomp Chomp is busy, so contractors should plan deliveries for earlier in the day. Public carparks with live lot counts are on the carparks page, and the wider area is on the District 19 page.
Sources: Roots.sg (Serangoon Garden); LTA (Cross Island Line); myVillage. Distances are straight-line; prices are left out because they change.
