Ashok and I were at Sunday Farmer café on Castle Street a couple of days ago when we spotted these twin cottages across the road. One blue, one peach, with matching gables, little octagonal windows and tiled roofs. We found ourselves talking about the Bangalore they belonged to. I didn’t have my camera with me that day, so I stopped to photograph them today on my way to the printers.
Castle Street, Wood Street and the nearby lanes formed part of the civilian neighbourhoods of Cantonment Bangalore. Anglo-Indians, Indian merchants, professionals and people whose work supported the military establishment lived in these neighbourhoods.
I have since learned that the cottages’ pitched roofs and decorative details suggest the Gothic-influenced domestic architecture that developed here during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bangalore’s “monkey-top” houses belong to this tradition, which local builders and residents adapted through ornamental timberwork and elaborate porches. I still don’t know when these particular cottages were built, or who lived in them.
I especially like how the much taller wall behind them makes their small scale so apparent. Looking at this photograph, I feel I have caught a surviving fragment of the residential Bangalore around which today’s commercial centre has grown.
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