Mumbai Guide: Join this walking tour around Ballard Estate to find its history

The Port Trust War Memorial

It's the early 1900s. The crown jewel of India still rests firmly on the head of the British Empire. South Bombay is dotted with docks, but the mighty Raj needs more to further its trade interests. So, the colonisers decide to reclaim land from the sea and build Alexandra Dock near Fort, later dumping the reclaimed soil over a 22-acre area to build a business district for the resultant shipping industry, around the year 1918.

Enter George Wittet, a Scotsman commissioned to design this business district. He's already made a name for himself with the Gateway of India, an Indo-Saracenic marvel, and other notable projects. But for this business district, Wittet decides to take a leaf out of the buildings in London. The trade in Bombay is coming in from Europe, and he feels that it's only fitting if the buildings reflect that by being European Neoclassical in structure. So with this thought in mind, Wittet goes about planning the shipping district, and when it is finally completed, it's named after the founding chairman of the Bombay Port Trust - Colonel JA Ballard.

Britannia and Co. Restaurant

"The area was bustling back then, with seamen, officers, porters, industrialists, etc, thronging the streets since morning," says Alisha Sadikot, who will conduct a walking tour of Ballard Estate (as the 22-acre plot of land is still known) this weekend. "The idea is to help the participants imagine what Mumbai was like when the city was on the brink of modernity in the early 20th century," she adds.

In the process, they might learn how longstanding names like Goa Street, Cochin Street and Calicut Street are fingerposts to history today. Historian Deepak Rao reveals, "Even before docks like Alexandra came up, the South Bombay coastline had many jetties. Small shipping vessels from the western coast of India docked there carrying goods like spices and coconuts for trade. Each jetty was meant for a particular port city, like Cochin (Kochi) or Calicut (Kozhikode). Thus, the street that led to it was named after the place from where the vessels originated."

A typically wide street in the Ballard Estate area

The participants will also be taken on a tour of some of the buildings where the erstwhile shipping industry carried out its commerce, and which stand as testimony to Wittet's architectural prowess even today. They will halt at the Ballard Bunder Gatehouse, New Customs House and the Port Trust War Memorial among other places (check map). The stops also include Hamilton Studio, where, incidentally, a young woman had once walked in with her mother to get photographs taken for marriage. The proprietor, Ranjeet Madhavji, convinced the mother that her daughter was of model material. He exhorted her to let him shoot portraits of the young woman and the mother, after some coaxing, finally agreed, thus launching the career of her offspring, who we know as Zeenat Aman.

Map/Ravi Jadhav

"But the walk will not be as much about the architecture - since most of the buildings are similar in structure - as it will be about the history of the place," Sadikot says.

Alisha Sadikot

The development of that area, says Rao, is something that we (whether we like it or not) owe almost entirely to the British, despite them having their own interests in mind. Sadikot feels that the Bombay Port Trust should also get more credit than it is given for giving shape to Ballard Estate - the city's first business district. And of course, so too for Wittet, who lies buried as a largely forgotten footnote in time in Sewri cemetery.