Sengkang West marked its 10th anniversary this year with a carnival featuring rides, games, food booths and performances by residents.
The Single Member Constituency (SMC) has come a long way since 2006, when it came out as a ward under the Ang Mo Kio Group Representation Constituency (GRC). It had the beautiful Punggol river, but not many HDB blocks nor facilities for residents.
Residents and grassroots leaders gathered on Sunday (July 10) near the Anchorvale Community Club to celebrate the constituency’s anniversary with a carnival featuring rides, games, food booths and performances by residents. Present at the event were Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and Minister of State Koh Poh Koon, both MPs of neighbouring Ang Mo Kio GRC. They participated in a mass dance put together by senior grassroots leaders and volunteers.
Mr Lee, who helped launch a new logo for Sengkang West, then mingled with the crowd to greet residents and often stopped to pose for selfies with those who asked him.
Sengkang West Member of Parliament Lam Pin Min recalled its transformation from vast plots of empty land to a residential community with transport and recreation facilities, mentioning the Seletar Mall, which opened last year, as an example.
Today, Sengkang West has many new blocks of flats, a sports complex, parks and its own shopping mall.
And by the fourth quarter this year, a childcare centre at Fernvale Link and two more covered walkways, from Anchorvale Street to Anchorvale Link and along Sengkang West Avenue starting from Seletar Mall, will be ready.
Residents can also look forward to new facilities to be built in the SMC, one of them is the Sengkang General and Community Hospital which will be completed in 2018 and also an integrated community facility, which will be built by 2020.
The celebration started with an Anniversary Carnival in the morning and rounded up with a Durian Fiesta at the community club in the evening.
Residents also got to see the constituency’s Community Emergency Response Team demonstrate how they should respond in the event of a terror attack.
All 3,000 tickets for the event were sold out two hours after it started.
To encourage residents to attend, organisers chartered Hippo buses to shuttle them to and from the carnival and various stops around the neighbourhood.
