Our Bedok Kampong House Singapore

With heartfelt gratitude, we celebrate a milestone: 25,000 blog page views. Over two years and 260 posts, our Bedok kampong house stories have grown into a collective archive - shaped not just by our memories, but by the voices of neighbours who shared this journey with us. Thank you for reading, remembering, and keeping these stories alive. If you’d like your own Bedok story to be part of this living heritage, send us a private message. We’d be honoured to hear from you.

Kampong folk sometimes mistook them for Arabs, but the residents of Rumah Bombay - as the house at 4E Bedok Road (formerly 614) was affectionately known - actually hailed from Gujarat in India. (Yes, Gujarat was part of North Bombay before 1 May 1960.) They were one large extended family, led by their patriarch, the late Haji Kassim bin Adam, who ran a thriving dates business at 29 Arab Street under the company named “Kassim bin Adam Pte Ltd”. They lived just next door to us, separated only by a simple fence. Abu Bakar, Haji Kassim’s grandson, still remembers vividly the day they moved in - January 1957 - and how the family transformed the former hostel/boarding house into a home spacious enough for the families of Haji Kassim’s seven children, their children, and grandchildren. The house eventually held nine bedrooms. At its peak, more than forty family members lived together under that magnificent two storey roof fenced with beautiful, yellow-flowered Australia Gold Vine creepers...