Ballard Estate Edwardian Quarter

Tucked behind the harbour at the eastern edge of Fort, Ballard Estate is the quietest corner of central Mumbai — a small grid of broad, low-traffic streets lined with matched stone blocks that look as though a slice of Edwardian London had been set down beside the Arabian Sea.

• The precinct stands on land reclaimed early in the twentieth century using spoil dredged during the construction of the harbour's Alexandra Dock, known today as Indira Dock, and it carries the name of Colonel John Archibald Ballard, an engineer associated with the founding of the Bombay Port Trust.
• Unlike the rest of the old city, which accumulated building by building over two centuries, this quarter was laid out in one go to a single controlling plan, and it still reads as one continuous composition rather than a collection of neighbours.
• That plan is credited to the Scottish architect George Wittet, the same hand behind the Gateway of India and the museum now called the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya.
• Wittet set out uniform four- and five-storey blocks faced in warm buff Malad stone, with arcaded ground floors, deep cornices, balustraded parapets and restrained neo-classical detail repeated street after street, so that the skyline never breaks and the pavement stays shaded.
• Shipping lines, insurance firms, coal agents and freight brokers took the offices, and several original names are still carved above the doorways of buildings such as Darabshaw House and Neville House.
• At the seaward end, the little stone Ballard Bunder gatehouse survives from the days when ocean passengers stepped off at Ballard Pier.
• Walk it on a Sunday morning and you may have whole blocks to yourself; on weekdays it fills with office workers and parked cars by ten.
• An unhurried loop takes forty-five minutes to an hour, and the quarter joins easily onto Horniman Circle, the Asiatic Society steps and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus.
• The working docks alongside are a restricted port area, so keep your camera pointed at the streets rather than the gates.
• For food, note that Ballard Estate is chiefly an office district and its scattered cafes run mixed menus, so vegetarians do best walking ten minutes west into Fort and Kalbadevi.
• That stretch holds long-running Gujarati and Rajasthani thali houses and plenty of Udupi-style canteens turning out idli, medu vada, uttapam and filter coffee, along with pav bhaji and sandwich carts near the older office blocks.
• Mumbai is also a big seafood city, so read the board or ask at the counter and confirm a kitchen is fully vegetarian before you order.