Azad Maidan

Azad Maidan is the great green pause in the middle of Mumbai's Fort district — roughly twenty-five acres of grass, worn earth and practice nets, hemmed in by some of the city's most photographed nineteenth-century facades.

• It lies a short walk from Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, the Bombay High Court and the University of Mumbai's Fort campus, and belongs to the chain of colonial-era open grounds — with Cross Maidan and the Oval a little to the south — that somehow survived the city's relentless appetite for building land.
• The name, adopted after Independence, simply means "free ground", and the maidan has long doubled as the city's designated space for public meetings and peaceful demonstrations, which is worth knowing if you arrive to find a stage rather than a stumps-and-bails morning.
• Cricket, though, is why most visitors come.
• On a dry-season morning the maidan carries a dozen or more matches at once, pitches laid out so close together that long-on for one game stands at slip in another, and a single cry of "catch it" can turn twenty heads.
• The pavilions along the edges belong to gymkhanas and clubs of every size — tin roofs, wooden benches, faded honours boards — and the school tournaments played here, including the long-running Harris and Giles Shields, have been the first serious stage for generations of Mumbai batsmen, several of whom went on to play Test cricket.
• Watching costs nothing and needs no arrangement: stand at a respectful distance from the boundary, keep an eye on more than one ball at a time, and the etiquette takes care of itself.
• Outside match hours the maidan works as ordinary city lung — walkers on the perimeter path at dawn, coaching camps through the school holidays, students crossing from CSMT with bags over their shoulders.
• It is at its best between October and April; the monsoon months turn much of the ground to standing water and the cricket moves indoors.
• Go early, carry water and sun cover, and give yourself time afterwards to walk the surrounding heritage precinct, which is among the finest street architecture in India.
• For food, the Fort and Kalbadevi streets immediately north and east of the maidan hold one of Mumbai's densest concentrations of vegetarian cooking — Udupi-style restaurants opening at breakfast with idli, medu vada and dosa; Gujarati and Rajasthani thali houses that fill up at lunch; and old farsan counters selling khaman, dhokla and patra by weight.
• Mumbai is also a major seafood city, so do not assume any particular street or class of eatery is meat-free: look for a board that says pure vegetarian, and confirm at the counter — including whether egg is used in sandwiches or bakery items — before you order.