Crawford Market Heritage Halls

North of Fort, where the banks and office blocks give way to wholesale lanes, a long hall of buff and red stone sits under a clock tower, its arcades spilling porters, handcarts and crates onto the pavement.

• This is Crawford Market — officially Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Mandai since the 1990s, though most Mumbaikars still use the older name, after Arthur Crawford, the city's first municipal commissioner.
• Completed in 1869, it was colonial Bombay's first great covered market and it is still a thoroughly working one, with prices called across the aisles in Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and English.
• Come for the building at least as much as for the shopping.
• The design is credited to William Emerson, the English architect who would later build Kolkata's Victoria Memorial, and the market reads as an early experiment in setting Gothic revival massing against Indian detail: pointed arches, a raised clerestory, and long naves that give the produce halls an unexpectedly cathedral-like feel.
• Over the main entrance and around the central drinking fountain are bas-relief friezes of Indian rural life carved under John Lockwood Kipling, then teaching at the Sir J.J.
• School of Art and better remembered today as Rudyard Kipling's father.
• Skylights and a deep roof pull daylight down onto the stalls, and the market is often cited as one of the first buildings in India to be lit by electricity, in the early 1880s.
• Sections of the complex have been under long-running conservation work, so expect hoardings and detours. Walk it slowly.
• The fruit hall is the showpiece — pyramids of Alphonso mangoes between April and June, chikoo, custard apple, Nagpur oranges in winter, and imported apples stacked in tissue.
• Beyond it the dry-goods aisles hold hills of cashew, date, walnut and fig, whole Kashmiri chillies, block jaggery, asafoetida and loose spices weighed on brass pans, while the outer lanes sell cane baskets, steel tiffin carriers and cheap luggage.
• Bargaining is expected and good-humoured; head-load porters work for a small negotiated fee.
• The market also contains wet sections and a live-animal block that many travellers find distressing — you can skip both entirely by keeping to the fruit, spice and dry-goods halls, which is where the architecture is finest anyway.
• For food, stay honest about the neighbourhood: this quarter mixes vegetarian and non-vegetarian kitchens door to door, so read the board and confirm before you order anywhere.
• The long-running cold-drinks and falooda house facing the market on Lokmanya Tilak Marg is the classic stop for kulfi, falooda and vegetarian sandwiches — ask at the counter to be sure of the day's menu.
• Ten to fifteen minutes north, Kalbadevi and Bhuleshwar hold one of the city's great vegetarian belts, with Gujarati thali bhojanalays, Marwari sweet shops and kachori counters; several are genuinely pure-veg, but check the signboard yourself.
• Nearer CSMT, Udupi-style cafés turn out idli, dosa and filter coffee from early morning, again worth a quick confirmation at the door.
• Buying fruit in the hall and washing it back at your room is the simplest lunch of all.