Chestnut ice cream, craft-soda sorbet, chocolate and yet more ice cream – with steamed buns, vinyl and sunset cocktails breaking up the sugar rush. Eight Song Wat stops, one afternoon and no time to dawdle.
Song Wat Road runs about 1.2 kilometres between Chinatown and the river, making it a natural walking route rather than a checklist. Laid out under King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) after a major fire that swept through Sampheng, the road is said to follow a line he personally traced on a royal map – hence Song Wat, roughly ‘drawn by the king’. Its first section was completed in 1892 and the road reached its present form in 1907, becoming a vital commercial artery as the district rebuilt around it.
For much of the next century, Song Wat simply got on with business: warehouses, gold traders, family-run shophouses and goods moving in from the river. Then came the street artists and coffee roasters. In 2022, local Kiattiwat Srichanwanpen launched a community initiative that has grown from 10 businesses to around 60.
This crawl came down to eight stops in four hours. I started around 2pm and needed to leave before 6pm, so allow at least four hours: three and a half is possible only if you keep every stop brisk. Give yourself longer if you’d rather linger, check each venue’s opening hours before setting out and don’t cut it so fine that you miss golden hour at Sober Record Bar – that would defeat the point of all the rushing.
