Dalal Street and the Stock Exchange District

Dalal Street is barely three hundred metres of tarmac in Fort, yet it gave the Indian language of money its address. The name simply means Broker Street, and by tradition the trade that fills it began under a banyan tree near the Town Hall, where a handful of share brokers met through the 1850s and 1860s to deal in cotton and bank paper.

• As their numbers grew they were moved on from one pavement to another until, in the 1870s, they settled on this lane and formalised themselves into the association that became the Bombay Stock Exchange.
• Nothing about the street announces that history; you have to arrive knowing it, then let the density of nameplates, share-transfer agents and courier boys confirm it.
• Architecturally the district is a compressed lesson in how Bombay built itself.
• The older fabric sits within a few minutes' walk — the Neoclassical Town Hall of the 1830s with its long flight of steps, the arcaded Victorian and Edwardian offices ringing Horniman Circle, the stripped Art Deco banks along Mint Road — all in the buff-and-grey basalt and Porbandar stone that gives Fort its particular flat light.
• Rising out of that low skyline is the deliberate contrast: the exchange's own tower, a lean concrete high-rise of roughly twenty-nine floors built through the 1970s and finished around 1980, named for a long-serving chairman of the exchange.
• A bronze bull installed in the late 2000s guards the approach and is now the quarter's most photographed object.
• Read it as an urban story rather than a monument, because there is nothing here to tour.
• Screen-based trading arrived in the mid-1990s and the open-outcry ring fell silent; the exchange buildings are working offices with security at the door, closed to casual visitors, and the younger National Stock Exchange sits far away in the Bandra Kurla Complex.
• What remains is the street theatre of a financial quarter at work, between Mumbai Samachar Marg — where the Gujarati daily Mumbai Samachar, published since 1822, still keeps its address — and the banyan-shaded lawns of Horniman Circle.
• Fort feeds its office crowds cheaply and, in large part, without meat.
• Gujarati, Marwari and Jain kitchens have served the trading houses here for generations, turning out thalis of dal, kadhi, farsan and rotli at lunch, while Udupi-style counters keep up a steady supply of idli, medu vada, dosa and filter coffee, and hand carts around Flora Fountain and Horniman Circle sell vada pav, sabudana vada and toasted sandwiches.
• Mumbai is also a great seafood- and egg-eating city, so nothing here is vegetarian by default — look for a clearly marked pure-veg board and confirm at the counter before you order.