KARACHI: Last year in April, Mayor of Karachi Wasim Akhtar announced that the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) was ready to hand over the management and maintenance of the historic Frere Hall and its gardens to an 18-member Guardian Board for a five-year (extendable) period.
An MoU was to be signed between the City Council and the board’s chairman Shahid Feroz. And on Nov 30, 2018, the City Council officially handed over the building to the board. The board, comprising eminent citizens (such as Amin Hashwani, Durriya Kazi, Ghazi Salahuddin and Shahid Abdulla) has ever since been working hard on the project and has in fact embarked upon an ambitious plan to restore some of the iconic features of the building, and to add a few new ones to enhance its cultural value.
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Over the years, a great many precious objects and artefacts have been stolen from the Frere Hall premises. They include a number of paintings and seraphs that were an integral part of a fountain (built in 1890) named after the renowned Parsi philanthropist Eduljee Dinshaw. Mr Feroz and his colleagues also intend to reproduce them.
This sounds promising, especially bearing in mind the historicity of this work of architecture. Frere Hall is Karachi’s first neo-Gothic piece of stonemasonry. It was constructed to honour the services of Sir Henry Bartle Frere, who became commissioner of Sindh in 1850 and 12 years later, governor of Bombay. He is accredited with many accomplishments, one of which is imparting a “modern” look to Sindh.
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