Fort icons

Spot grumpy-looking keystones and a church for the ‘elite’ on a walk that celebrates the old Bombay Green

One can never tire of the beautiful Fort area that has history trapped in its walls. With this in mind, Bharat Ghostokar of Khaki Tours has organised the Bombay Greens walk, scheduled for this weekend.

St Thomas Cathedral

On naming the walk thus, he says that they could not have named it Mumbai Greens because the space had stopped existing many years ago. “The entire area between Horniman Circle and Bombay Stock Exchange was an open maidan. Soldiers were trained here, agricultural produce and opium was also dumped here,” he shares.

The stamp office at Horniman Circle 

This walk is considerably shorter than other walks of Khaki, like the Banganga walk, which takes nearly two-and-a-half hours. “The Fort area carries potential for many short walks. This one starts from Hermes Showroom, Horniman Circle, and covers a kilometre in an hour-and-a-half,” Ghostokar says.

The stopovers include the St Thomas Church (“The south of which lived the Europeans and the north of which lived the elite Indians”), the Asiatic Society and the Elphinstone building. “This was the nucleus around which the city of Bombay grew,” he says.

While hovering around places of Horniman Circle, he will share the story of how it came to be. “Benjamin Guy Horniman was a British journalist and the editor of the Bombay Chronicle. He was vocal in his support of Indian independence. He criticised General Dyer’s actions after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The circle was built as a tribute to him,” he says.

Ghostokar points out that even the facades of buildings of the Elphinstone Circle are fascinating. “Each keystone has the face of a grumpy man. It will be interesting to discover how the two faces are alike,” he says.

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