A tour of old Bangalore
I was reading Anita’s post on where did the Bangalore of yore go? I guess it is pretty much the same of most cities. Bangalore’s decline (if I can call it that way…) has been more profound in the last decade or so.
Cut back nearly 6 decades and you might see the views that your parents would have seen as children or your grandparents might have seen in their youthful days. Bangalore, then, was literally the pensioner’s paradise, the garden city… the city where you did not require to switch on the ceiling fan even in peak summer.
Am literally pasting a forwarded email that I received today. Credit goes to the person who actually compiled this info first.
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Welcome back into the past. here are some images of Bangalore, generations old, that are apparantly lost in the pages of history. Come, travel with me back in time to the banglore in the days of the raj, when it was still a small cantonment town. the year was 1946. And the place, Namma Bengaluru.
Does this frame look familiar??? It should. This is the BRIGADE ROAD. The left hand side building is still standing, and housed the Ashok Electricals, the Post Office, now it is the LEE and Luis Phillips showroom. The road hasn’t got any bigger, but the traffic and the crowd definitely has.
And here’s the SOUTH PARADE road, any guesses what it is called now?? THE M.G. ROAD. The building you are seeing is the Higginbothams bookstore, which looks dilapidated on the present day.
The above picture is of Hosur Road. the present day electronics, IT and BPO Hub.
The town hall area….
This strong stone building is now only known as the Oriental Building( presently houses the LIC) and is at the intersection of MG Road (then called as, South Parade) and St. Marks Road. There apparently was a large circle at this juncture as can be seen in the photograph. The road you are looking at is St. Marks Road.
This is the Mayo hall. It sure looks much more regal than what it does today. It houses the Courts and was apparently also one of the main Police Station jails. I do not believe that the staircase shown in the picture still exists, and the view is supposedly that from Residency Road, only after taking a print out will I be able to compare because the building is so symmetrical.
Observe something?? The licence plate shows BAN565 suggests that there were under 1000 cars in Bangalore in 1946. or in the entire state (then known as the state of Mysore).
Could not take my eye of those beautiful pictures and went into a terrible nostalgia. I am so grateful for the person who preserved them for eternity by capturing them through his cameralens.
Superb. Am certain that we can appeal for further pictures of old Bangalore from readers which, perhaps, we can showcase separately here…just a thought!
Nice. I remember seeing some of these pictures at the Corner House ice cream parlour.
There’s a delectable restaurant in the Majestic Area, off Tribhuvan – was called 3rd Main (road adjacent to Kamat Yatrnivas), later Vijay Vihar, I think, which had similar pictures and caricatures of old Bangalore.
Welcome to MetroBlogging from Nashville!
absolutely beautiful pictures and i wonder when and who took them! i especially like the one of hosur road and brigade road. they’re absolutely unrecognisable now!
nice. very nice. whats with the topis in the last photograph? whats the story behind that?
I recd these pics few months back..
I remember we as children walking down on these roads and taking city bus. I think the time taken to reach by commuting in city bus then is equal(or lesser) than the time taken now by riding in our mobikes/scooters using all kinds of techniques to squeeze in the little available space.