engineering

Maxwell Food Centre

Maxwell Food Centre is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Maxwell Food Centre rather than just read about it. In short: Maxwell Food Centre is a hawker centre located in Tanjong Pagar, at the junction of Maxwell Road and South Bridge Road. The hawker centre is part of the Downtown Core planning area.

Key takeaways

Maxwell Food Centre belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Maxwell Food Centre to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Maxwell Food Centre from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Maxwell Food Centre is a hawker centre located in Tanjong Pagar, at the junction of Maxwell Road and South Bridge Road. The hawker centre is part of the Downtown Core planning area. Maxwell is one of the most popular hawker centres in Singapore, featuring 103 hawkers selling a wide variety of local and international cuisines. Popular dishes include ham chim peng, ngo hiang, and herbal broths made from home-brewed recipes.

History

Maxwell Market (1928–1987) Built on a Chinese burial ground, construction of the market began in 1927 at an initial cost of S$103,516. In July 1928, a tender notice was published for the construction of stalls within the market. The tender costed an additional S$11,505, bringing the total construction cost to S$115,021. Opened on 17 November 1928 as Maxwell Market, it received thousands of applications for rental of the stalls within the market. However, as the municipality anticipated that many of the applicants were going to resell their stalls at a higher price to others, each licence allocated was unable to be transferred. The opening of Maxwell also attracted many unlicenced hawkers, causing stallholders to be unable to make any profits. The market was also known as Kim Hua Market. As such, the total rent collected in 1928 was only S$3,545, and the market remained empty as many stallholders decided to give up their stalls and continue operating in the vicinity, where they did not have to pay rent or be bounded by the market regulations. To increase tenancy in Maxwell, a by-law banning hawkers in the vicinity was proposed, and stalls were rent-free till the end of 1930 for existing stallholders. On 5 January 1931, the rent-free scheme was further extended till the end of March 1931. In December 1946, Maxwell Market was the first location chosen by the Singapore Social Welfare Department to house a restaurant aimed at providing cheaper food to families. Named as the Family Restaurant, it prepared 2,000 meals daily at a cost of 8 cents, and the meals consisted carbohydrates such as rice and potatoes, as well as salmon. In January 1949, the municipality passed a rule for municipal markets to only sell perishable goods, and as such, money changers, provision and bread sellers had to relocate their business elsewhere.

Maxwell Food Centre On 16 March 1987, after a five-month renovation, Maxwell Market reopened as Maxwell Road Food Centre. With construction costing about S$74,000, the hawker centre housed 70 hawkers from their former site at China Square. However, individual stalls did not have access to running water, and hawkers had to share a common washing area originally meant for washing raw market produce. As such, dirty dishes and cooking ingredients were put together as these washing points, causing the concrete floor to be always wet and littered with trash and food waste. On 16 October 1991, the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) announced that the hawker centre will be demolished to make way for its S$240 million new headquarters. Two days later, the hawkers were informed that they must move out by 30 November 1992, and most of them feared being split up and relocated across the island. The affected hawkers were given the option of either accepting an ex gratia cash payment of up to S$15,000, or moving to another vacant stall in existing hawker centres. However, on 8 July 1993, URA shelved its plans, and the hawker centre remained at its current location. As such, the Ministry of Environment announced plans to renovate the hawker centre, and it was closed on 1 September 2000. After a S$3.2 million renovation, Maxwell Road Food Centre reopened as Maxwell Food Centre on 15 May 2001, housing 103 hawkers.

Present day

Maxwell is one of the most popular hawker centres, and the most featured hawker centre on Instagram, with more than 13,200 posts. In 2016, Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice, a Hainanese chicken rice stall ran by husband and wife Mr and Mrs Loy Chee San, was the first stall in the hawker centre to be awarded a Bib Gourmand. Celebrities, like singer Dua Lipa, Lady Gaga and actress Drew Barrymore, and foreign dignitaries, such as Vietnam Minister of Foreign Affairs Bùi Thanh Sơn and New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, have also dined at the hawker centre.

See also Hawker centre Singaporean cuisine

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Maxwell Food Centre

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Maxwell Food Centre claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Maxwell Food Centre before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Maxwell Food Centre ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Maxwell Food Centre

In research: Maxwell Food Centre appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Maxwell Food Centre in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Maxwell Food Centre is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1928 establishments in Singapore, Buildings and structures completed in 2001, Hawker centres in Singapore, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Maxwell Food Centre outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Maxwell Food Centre in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Maxwell Food Centre means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Maxwell Food Centre out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Maxwell Food Centre in simple terms?

Maxwell Food Centre is a hawker centre located in Tanjong Pagar, at the junction of Maxwell Road and South Bridge Road. The hawker centre is part of the Downtown Core planning area.

Why does Maxwell Food Centre matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Maxwell Food Centre?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Maxwell Food Centre.