Royal Alfred Sailors' Home Heritage Building

Stand at the busy junction where Shahid Bhagat Singh Marg meets Madame Cama Road, just south-west of Regal Circle in Colaba, and one building refuses to be ignored: a heavy, dark-stoned Gothic Revival block bristling with pointed arches, gables and a stubby corner tower.

• This is the old Royal Alfred Sailors' Home, raised in the 1870s from a public subscription fund to give merchant seamen ashore in Bombay a decent, orderly place to sleep, eat and wait for their next ship.
• It takes its name from Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, whose celebrated visit to Bombay in 1870 gave the fundraising its momentum.
• The design is credited to Frederick William Stevens, then a young engineer-architect who would later give the city its most famous silhouettes.
• Architecturally it is a wonderful piece of Bombay stone-craft.
• The walls are built of the local blue-grey basalt that gives so much of nineteenth-century Bombay its sombre weight, banded and dressed with paler stone so the facade reads in horizontal stripes.
• Above the main entrance sits the building's signature flourish: a carved tympanum of Neptune, the sea god, riding with his attendant sea horses through the surf — a fitting welcome for sailors, and a detail best appreciated with a long lens or a patient pause on the far pavement.
• Look also for marine motifs in the capitals and spandrels, the deep shaded verandahs that keep the Konkan sun off the stone, and the steep slate-dark roofline.
• The Sailors' Home stopped serving seamen long ago.
• Through the twentieth century it passed into government use — including a spell as a legislative chamber — and today it functions as a headquarters of the Maharashtra Police.
• That means there is no public entry and no ticket: this is a pavement monument, appreciated from outside like a piece of street sculpture.
• Be discreet and courteous with a camera, keep clear of gates and security posts, and photograph the architecture rather than personnel.
• It slots neatly into a South Mumbai heritage walk that takes in the Art Deco frontages around Regal Circle, the domed museum campus at Kala Ghoda, the Oval Maidan's Victorian Gothic skyline and the harbour arch of the Gateway of India, all within an easy stroll.
• For food, this corner of Colaba and Fort is one of the easier parts of Mumbai to eat vegetarian, provided you choose deliberately.
• Mumbai is a major seafood city, and plenty of kitchens along Colaba Causeway cook fish and meat, so look for a clearly marked "pure veg" or "shudh shakahari" board and confirm at the counter before you order.
• The reliable formats are the Udupi-style tiffin cafés of the Fort lanes, where idli, medu vada, sambar, crisp dosas and strong filter coffee are served all day, and the Gujarati and Rajasthani thali houses of the Churchgate and Nariman Point office belt, which put out generous unlimited lunches on weekdays.
• For something lighter, the juice, sandwich and chaat counters around Regal Circle and Cooperage will build you a vegetarian plate on request — just ask them to keep the grill and chutneys vegetarian.
• If you have a whole evening, the century-old South Indian coffee-and-tiffin culture of Matunga, a short suburban-train ride north, is the city's most famous concentration of vegetarian kitchens.