Siam Square

In contradiction to what you might expect from its name, Siam Square is not a public square graced with statues of national heroes but a grid of narrow animated streets devoted to the popular national pastimes of shopping and eating. It’s not square in any other sense either but one of the trendiest spots for Bangkok’s expanding middle-class youth to meet and be seen. It has sometimes been described as the closest thing Bangkok has to a centre and it is at least true that it is now the point where the two lines of the skytrain system converge and intersect.

Siam Square is built on a plot of land belonging to the adjoining Chulalongkorn University, whose well-heeled and often precariously high-heeled students still form probably half of its pedestrian population at almost any given moment of the day. The University was not slow to sense the commercial potential of the site and oversaw the erection of its current rows of traditional shop-houses some fifty years ago. It is part of the character of the place that some of its original businesses still remain while new ones on the cutting edge of juvenile fashion are constantly opening.

The original shop-houses are still there for the most part. While in many places they have become unrecognisable behind walls of advertising, in one or two others their traditional shutters have received coats of varnish to highlight their distinctive architectural charm. Most of the access roads recessed from the main central street have become crowded car parks patrolled by fearsome matrons in purple uniforms but towards the Novotel one has been paved over and its spreading trees shelter circular benches, ice-cream and drinks stalls and a particularly large and opulent spirit-house, where the resident spirit of Siam Square is regularly regaled with flowers, incense and plates of sticky desserts by grateful prospering shopkeepers.

The tastes of Chulalongkorn students dominate the Square. The tame, sentimental but inventively tuneful Thai pop they favour wafts all day from the corner loudspeakers of Siam Square Radio, whose youthful presenters occasionally give announcements in an English heavy with the accent of the US or Australian high schools they have recently left. Shop windows sport platform shoes (‘office block shoes’ in Thai) that should carry health warnings for the acrophobic, pink and turquoise fluffy handbags, colour-coordinated sunglasses. Unisex hairstylists wait to cosset you on every second corner while if that’s not enough, you can drop into one of the many skin clinics where trained professionals will fall over each other to give advice on banishing spots and freckles you didn’t even know you had. The unashamed cuteness of Thai youth culture comes into its own especially on St Valentine’s Day, when every pavement of Siam Square is clogged by students of both sexes staggering under the weight of padded pink hearts on glittery sticks, bunches of coy rosebuds swathed in white veils and winsome teddy bears.

The sois of Siam Square are numbered consecutively from west to east on the skytrain side and from east to west on the university side with the busy central soi being Soi 7. To either side of almost every soi, dimly-lit arcades lined for the most part with small trendy clothes stalls thread the blocks of shop-houses. Each has received its own name, ranging from ‘Siam Bypass’, appropriate enough for a short-cut, to the more quirky and inscrutable ‘Siam Carrot’. The well-known ‘Centrepoint’, on the other hand, is an open paved area between rows of shop-houses furnished with a small fountain at one end and a stage hosting weekend concerts at the other.

Along the north side of Siam Square, there are three cinemas. The three small screens of the Lido are the best place for finding some variety from the standard fare of Hollywood blockbusters, frequently showing US independents, European and Japanese movies. The magnificent sweeping screens and vast auditoriums of the Scala and the Siam, a little way to either side of the Lido, make them period buildings almost worth visiting for their own sake. All three cinemas regularly play host to the Bangkok Film Festival and other smaller festivals.

To the north and west, the square is walled off by more recent shopping mall buildings. Shutting off the sunset, the gigantic Mah Boon Krong runs into the Patumwan Princess Hotel, a comfortable and stylish choice for those who can afford it. It’s easy to lose your way in the cavernous interior of MBK (as it’s often called), where labyrinths of small stalls specialize in electronic equipment and clothes at reasonable prices. For those who prefer the familiarity of a conventional department store, a branch of the Japanese chain, Tokyu, spreads over four of its floors at its northern end. You can access the National Stadium skytrain station direct from here. The National Stadium itself (there are football matches here on many Saturdays) is immediately to the west of MBK while from the other side of the skytrain station, you can descend straight into the surprisingly quiet Soi Gasemsan 1, where most trainees stay in a cluster of upmarket guesthouses. To the east of here, closing off Siam Square to the north, the Discovery Centre is joined by a bridge to the Siam Centre, which is linked to the Siam Paragon, the latest of Bangkok's glistening malls and which opened in 2006. The fashionable shops in these two buildings are far from cheap but the flagship branch of Asia Books on the fifth floor of the Discovery Centre sells a very wide range of English-language books at almost nothing more or sometimes even less than the cover price in pounds or dollars. There are plush, state-of-the-art cinemas showing Hollywood movies in both MBK and the Discovery Centre. Siam Paragon also has a branch of the Kinokuniya bookshop on the 3rd foor, which sells an enormous selection of quality books.

There is a wide range of places to eat in Siam Square. Both MBK and the Siam Centre have the crowded, noisy ‘food-courts’ typical of Thai shopping centres, where a range of stalls specialise in different types of Thai food at very low prices. In Siam Square itself you can find anything from gloomy Chinese restaurants complete with gangsters gathered in a dark corner, where the staff seem to have aged along with the building, to Kentucky Fried Chicken, Macdonalds and a range of copycat Western fast food outlets. More traditional Thai restaurants, such as the famous Baan Khun Mae (‘Mother’s House’), its interior a dark wooden treasure-store of Thai antiques, sit next to trendy fusion cuisine outlets, all brightly coloured plastic and soft music, that appeal to the tastes of slim-waisted fat-pursed ‘Chula chicks’. The second and third floors of the Siam Centre are also a good place for Thai fusion cuisine and for Japanese food but everything comes at a price here.

Even a few years ago you would have been hard-pressed to find a good cup of coffee in the whole area but its recent trendiness has caused cafés and stalls to spring up all over the place, offering latte, cappuccino and espresso alongside more typically Thai delights such as raspberry-flavoured coffee shakes. There is even a branch of Starbuck’s incorporated into the Kasikorn Bank (they call it "coffee banking"). Siam Square is not really a place for drinking in the evening but there are a few bars with music too loud for conversation that cater to students who are not yet ready to go home.

Because of its skytrain connections, Siam Square is within easy reach of the shopping and entertainment areas along Silom and Sukhumwit Roads and about twenty minutes from the weekend market at Chatuchak. The Grand Palace, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha and Wat Po can be reached easily by taxi (around 60 baht one-way), by air-conditioned bus or for the more adventurous, by canal boat from the pier at the Elephant Bridge, just beyond the end of Soi Gasemsan 1. Jim Thompson’s House, a collection of lovingly preserved and elegantly furnished traditional Thai teak houses, can be found in a small peaceful garden at the end of Soi Gasemsan 2.