Horniman Circle Garden

Step off the traffic-thick lanes of Fort and the volume drops by a register. Horniman Circle Garden is an oval of clipped lawn, old rain trees, iron railings and a modest fountain, set down in the middle of Mumbai's oldest business district and ringed by an almost unbroken arc of neoclassical buildings whose ground floors run as one continuous colonnaded arcade.

• The effect is frankly imported — a Victorian idea of a European city square, rebuilt in plaster and stone on the Konkan coast — but it works, because the arcade walls off the street and leaves you with birdsong, shade and office workers eating lunch on the grass.
• For a city with very little accessible green at its southern tip, that is a genuine luxury.
• The ground here was once Bombay Green, the open space in front of the Town Hall where the cotton trade, auctions and public meetings of the old fortified town played out.
• The garden was laid out in 1869, and the circle of buildings around it went up through the 1860s and 1870s to a coordinated scheme, which is why the façades share their proportions, their arches and their creamy render so precisely — a rare piece of planned streetscape in a city that mostly grew by accident.
• It was known as Elphinstone Circle for most of its life and was renamed after Independence for Benjamin Horniman, the British editor of the Bombay Chronicle who supported the Indian nationalist cause and was deported for it.
• On the eastern side stands the Town Hall, completed in the 1830s, its Doric colonnade rising above a broad flight of steps; the Asiatic Society's library occupies it still, and it remains one of the finest neoclassical buildings in India.
• The garden is small enough to circle in ten minutes and good enough to sit in for an hour.
• Come early, when walkers, pigeon-feeders and the odd tai chi group have the place, or in the last hour of daylight, when the arcade turns honey-coloured and the whole ring photographs beautifully.
• It is free, gated and calm, and it makes the natural mid-point of a Fort walking route: the Asiatic Society steps are a minute away, Flora Fountain and the Kala Ghoda art district about ten minutes on foot, and CSMT's Gothic pile roughly fifteen.
• Sundays are quietest, since the surrounding offices empty out entirely.
• Food around the Circle keeps office hours, and the block mixes vegetarian and non-vegetarian kitchens, so read the board rather than assume.
• The lanes running north towards Kalbadevi and Bhuleshwar are the strongest bet for pure-vegetarian eating: unlimited Gujarati thalis at lunch, Rajasthani dal-baati, and farsan shops selling khandvi, dhokla and fafda to carry back to the lawn.
• Closer in, around Flora Fountain and Fort Market, small South Indian counters turn out idli, medu vada and paper dosa with filter coffee, alongside snack rooms doing vada pav, batata bhaji and sabudana khichdi on Mumbai's many fasting days.
• Several of these are vegetarian-only houses, but plenty of their neighbours are not, so confirm at the counter before you order — and if you keep a Jain kitchen, say so up front, since onion and garlic are standard here unless asked otherwise.