Old Secretariat (City Civil and Sessions Court)

Along the eastern flank of the Oval Maidan, Mumbai lines up a row of nineteenth-century Gothic public buildings, and the Old Secretariat is the one that began the sequence.

• Completed in 1874 to designs by Colonel Henry St Clair Wilkins of the Royal Engineers, who then led the Bombay Public Works Department, it was raised to house the Presidency's administrative offices and today houses the City Civil and Sessions Court.
• It should not be confused with Wilkins's separate Public Works Department Secretariat, a different Gothic block beside the High Court.
• Its long, banded front faces the maidan across a line of rain trees, and on a clear cold-season morning the whole composition reads like a stage set: cricket nets and practice pitches in the foreground, arcaded stone behind.
• The idiom is Venetian Gothic, the style the city adopted wholesale in the 1860s and 1870s.
• Wilkins gave the building tiers of deep arcaded verandahs — not ornament but climate engineering, shading the offices behind from the Konkan sun while letting the sea breeze run through.
• The stonework is deliberately polychrome, local grey-blue basalt set against paler dressings, with pointed arches, slender colonettes and carved capitals marching along a facade usually cited at around 443 feet, among the longest unbroken street fronts in the precinct, with towers anchoring the ends.
• The formula worked out here — verandah, polychromy, pointed arch — was repeated with variations in the High Court and the University buildings immediately to the north, which is why this block is best understood as the template rather than the climax of the Gothic quarter.
• It is a contributing property in the Victorian Gothic and Art Deco Ensembles of Mumbai, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2018. It is not a museum.
• The building remains in judicial use and its interiors are not open for sightseeing, so plan an exterior visit.
• Walk the Oval's perimeter path down from the Churchgate end towards Madame Cama Road, stop on the maidan side where the whole front is visible at once, then turn around: the Art Deco apartment blocks on Maharshi Karve Road face it directly, and that two-styles-across-one-park contrast is precisely what the World Heritage listing recognises.
• Early light falls flat on the facade; late afternoon backlights the arcades.
• Keep clear of the entrance gates and security posts, and do not photograph them.
• For food, the Oval sits a short walk from Churchgate and the Fort lanes, where old-fashioned counter-service snack rooms turn out idli, dosa, upma and filter coffee, and where pav bhaji, vada pav and sandwich stalls work the pavements around the maidans.
• Mumbai is a mixed-menu city and nothing here is vegetarian by default: read the board, look for an explicit pure-veg declaration, and confirm at the counter — including about egg in sandwiches, breads and cakes — before you order.
• A little further north, the Fort and Kalbadevi lanes hold long-running Gujarati and Udupi-style dining rooms where a full thali is the point rather than a snack, and the same confirm-first rule applies.
• A glass of fresh sugarcane juice or nimbu-pani from a cart at the maidan edge is the standard way to close a heritage walk.