Eros Cinema

Step out of Churchgate station, look across the traffic on Maharshi Karve Road, and a wedge of cream stone rises at the corner like the prow of an ocean liner run aground in the middle of the city.

• This is Eros, a cinema completed in 1938 within the Cambata Building, and one of the most photographed pieces of Art Deco in a city that holds one of the world's largest concentrations of the style.
• It sits at the western hinge of the Oval Maidan precinct, where cricketers in whites play through the afternoon with a parade of Deco apartment blocks along one side of the green and the Victorian Gothic spires of the university and the High Court rising along the other.
• Few street corners in India stage two architectural eras against each other quite so cleanly.
• The design is generally credited to the Mumbai architect Sohrabji Bhedwar, and the building rewards a slow circuit on foot.
• The facade is faced in pale cream Malad stone, the local basalt-quarry stone that gives so much of this precinct its buttery tone, and is banded and trimmed in deep red Agra sandstone.
• The composition is symmetrical and deliberately theatrical: flanking wings step back in ziggurat tiers, vertical fins and fluted piers draw the eye upward, and a stepped central tower carries the cinema's name in period lettering that has become a shorthand for Bombay Deco itself.
• Look for the sunburst and chevron motifs in the stonework, the curved corner glazing, and the way the whole mass turns its shoulder to meet the road junction rather than facing it square on.
• Eros is a working cinema again.
• It closed in 2017 and, after restoration, reopened in February 2024 as a single 305-seat IMAX auditorium, so the restored foyer and hall are seen by ticket-holders at showtimes — buy at the cinema's own box office and check current show timings locally.
• For most architecture walkers, though, the exterior is the point, and it is free.
• Come in the cooler months, ideally in the last hour of daylight when low sun warms the cream stone, and thread the stop into a walk that takes in Oval Maidan, the Deco frontages of Marine Drive and the Kala Ghoda lanes.
• For food, this corner of South Mumbai is unusually kind to vegetarians, though Mumbai at large is a major seafood and non-vegetarian city, so read the board before you sit down.
• The lanes immediately behind Churchgate station, around J.
• Tata Road and Veer Nariman Road, hold long-running thali houses serving unlimited Gujarati and Punjabi meals, several of which have been all-vegetarian kitchens for decades — ask at the counter to confirm, since menus and management change.
• South Indian tiffin rooms in Fort and Kala Ghoda turn out idli, medu vada, dosa and filter coffee from early morning, and juice bars along Veer Nariman Road do vegetable sandwiches and fresh lime soda, where it is worth asking whether egg or egg-based mayonnaise goes into the sandwich.