To dine in a former ice factory, visit a prominent auction house or peek into Mumbai’s oldest photo studio, head to Ballard Estate. Here, the past, quite literally, stares you in the face, with wide, tree-lined streets and elegant Renaissance- inspired architecture reminiscent of London’s
city centre. A walk through this historic neighbourhood will transport you to early 20th-century Bombay, when the work of one man, George Wittet, transformed the city’s skyline.

When the Scottish architect arrived in Bombay in 1904, the city’s romance with the Gothic-Revival style was on the wane. For much of the previous four decades, Bombay had marked its rapid growth into Urbs Prima in Indus, the first city of India, in monumental Gothic buildings, an all-out celebration in stone of vibrant form and sculptural decoration. Think of the ornate Victoria Terminus (now CST) or the University of Mumbai Library and Convocation Hall buildings.

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Ballard Estate was Wittet’s masterpiece. Conceived and laid out by him for the Bombay Port Trust between 1908-1914, it was intended to be the
 city’s premier business address. It was spread across 22 acres of land reclaimed during the construction of Alexandra (now Indira) docks, its building styles 
and heights closely followed Wittet’s guidelines, creating a unified, harmonious assemblage of Edwardian design.

With bright and airy work spaces, Ballard Estate rivalled the closed, dark buildings of the older Fort area, and soon found favour with some of the leading companies of the day: including shipping giant British India Steam Navigation Co Ltd, established by Sir William Mackinnon and Robert Mackenzie in 1862. By the turn of the 19th century the “BI’s” formidable 
fleet was described as “straddling the seas East of the Suez, here, there and everywhere.” Its rival, the Scindia Steam Navigation Company, the first wholly Indian shipping company that defied British monopoly over the sea trade routes, also chose Ballard Estate. As did the Indian branch of the multinational Pathé Frères, at the time a noted manufacturer of cinematographs and other motion picture equipment, which built its headquarters, Pathe House, in the Estate (now Hague building)

Close to the entrance, on Shoorji Vallabhdas Marg, stands Wittet’s building for the Port Trust, its stone façade marked with two sculpted ships in subtle reference to the institution’s legacy, since 1873: of developing and administering the port along the city’s eastern seaboard. Next door, the imposing New Custom House, with its striking portico, stands testimony to Bombay’s growing mercantile reach and ballooning volume of trade and custom clearances in the early 20th century that necessitated the construction of an additional “new” customs house. Street names such as “Cochin” and “Calicut” in Ballard Estate recall the maritime world of which Bombay was once the centre: You can almost picture ships laden with spices and textiles from those cities, anchored at the city docks as they prepared for their long journeys westward.