My Kind of Town: the potential of Kolkata’s built heritage made it a favourite of new RIBA president Ben Derbyshire, writing for AT in 2005
There are a number of criteria one could use for choosing a town for this column; the quality of life it offers, how it exemplifies sense of place, its physical beauty. Some years ago I went to Kolkata as part of a London Rivers Association delegation working with the city on the regeneration of its crumbling river front. Kolkata is my kind of town, not for any of the above reasons, but because it offered an amazing opportunity to do what I like doing best.
The built heritage in the old heart of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), on the banks of the Ganges (or Hoogly, where it passes through the city), is acknowledged to be amongst the finest of any Indian city. Our work centred on the four warehouses located between the river’s edge and the Strand Road, in the commercial heart of the city.
Unlike any city I have visited before, Kolkata’s streets reveal its life. Our drivers carved their way through chaos with red flashing lights and ruthless determination in government Ambassadors – the ubiquitous, locally-made version of the 1954 Morris Oxford. In every corner someone is trying to make a few rupees. Wastepaper is recycled piece-by-piece and so the streets are surprisingly free of rubbish. Stalls occupy the uneasy no-man’s-land between pedestrians and traffic. Vendors sell cups of tea in handmade clay disposable cups, which somehow symbolise the value of labour in an economy where entrepreneurial spirit is directed entirely at the serious business of survival.
Just north of the warehouses the mighty Hoogly Bridge links Kolkata to Howra station, from which millions disgorge daily to make their way into the city. Buses, taxis and cars team across the bridge, as do pedestrians, in a solid phalanx at peak times. Ferries ply from jetties by the station to locations on the east bank.
The wharves along Strand Road, including those around the warehouses, handle an enormous tide of human traffic which forces its way through a congested maze of alleyways, passages and pavements. Apart from the thrombosis this creates for the free flow of circulation in the city, Kolkata’s main gateway from the east creates a very poor first impression of the city.
Here the poor keep themselves and their clothes clean, or as clean as is practical in water that has travelled more than a thousand miles from the Himalayas”
The Ganges is a sacred river, a ritual-bathing place for Hindus and the focus of religious festivals and ceremonies. It also serves as a burial place. The water is strewn with petals and wreaths, thrown in after the ashes of the dead who have been cremated in the multiple pyres that billow smoke at the water’s edge. Here too the poor keep themselves and their clothes clean, or as clean as is practical in water that has travelled more than a thousand miles from the Himalayas.
So against the tide of commuters come a stream of the faithful and the poor to the ghats, where they descend steps into the sacred water. These ghats are hauntingly beautiful structures in colonial neoclassical style, in amongst the wharfage behind Strand Road, sadly neglected but in a rather romantic state of decay. Amidst all this is a flower market, an amazing ramshackle warren of cupboard-sized stalls selling flowers, exotic plants and everything that can be manufactured from them. Between the warehouses and the river runs the Circular Railway. There is nothing quite like the sight of an oncoming Indian train, rolling and pitching like a boat through the heat-haze towards you, flanks be-whiskered with clinging humanity.
To deal with this cocktail of conflicts, we ran an ‘enquiry by design’ – three days of workshops on ‘context and connections’, ‘heritage’, ‘urban design’ and finally ‘financial and organisational issues’. We worked with Indian colleagues to create a masterplan and delivery framework for the east bank of the Hoogly. At the end we hired a local artist, Samir Biswas, to go out and sketch scenes of the quayside, to envisage how the place might look one day. He came back with a drawing of the west front of the Strand Road warehouse with the clutter swept away and replaced with a riverside piazza filled with life, stalls, vendors and entertainers. It encapsulated the argument. The Strand warehouse could become a building at the gateway to Kolkata as significant to the city, and as imposing from across the Hoogly, as is the Louvre from across the Seine.
Kolkata became my kind of town; a place with the ingredients for sustainable regeneration; energetic people, entrepreneurial spirit, great natural assets and remarkable built heritage. I have scarcely had more fun than I did here, getting to know Kolkata by meeting and working with its people and planning its future.
