Mumbai News

Hornby’s city: Bombay’s reclamation to Mumbai’s redevelopment – Moneycontrol.com

Apollo Bandar, Colaba, Mumbai. In 1782, William Hornby unleashed a plan to integrate the seven islands comprising Bombay with the deep natural harbour. The project came to be known as the Hornby Vellard project.

The history is contentious. But the year was 1782. Bombay was until recently made up of seven islands with an unremarkable presence. Travel between the islands often needed a boat. During high tides and monsoons- many areas would get flooded. Until then, the key lure of Bombay was it’s proximity to Surat – an important port city of the Mughal Empire. That was the reason for the Portuguese and the British to have an interest in Bombay. A man by the name of William Hornby, who had joined the East India Company three decades earlier, rose to become the Governor of Bombay in 1782. The same year, he would initiate something that would change the city forever.

Hornby unleashed a plan to integrate the islands with a deep natural harbour. The project would be termed the Hornby Vellard project. It took almost five decades and numerous influential people to complete all of it. The last integration would be between the areas of Mahim and Bandra that was funded by the wealthy Lady Jamsetjee on the condition that no toll would be charged from users. The integration would make several marshy and unattractive lands available for housing. It even led to select areas attracting the wealthy of Bombay. The famed Byculla Club was prestigious and exclusive in its gentry. The richest man of the city David Sassoon had his house around that location.

While other factors also played a role, the integration of the islands with supporting infrastructure created space and opportunity for the opening of an industry that would later place Bombay on the global map: textiles. In 1854, the first cotton factory would be inaugurated through a collaboration between a Parsi entrepreneur and machinery manufacturers from Britain. The inflexion point was arguably the testing of the Ring Spinning Frame technique by Jamsetji Tata that could double the output per spindle. It would subsequently be adopted on large commercial scale from the 1880s. By the time things had settled down in 1927, the island of Bombay had 83 mills with its capacity exceeding the output of all the other parts of the Bombay Presidency as well as the output of all the other provinces in India. Majority of the mills were located in what is today termed as ‘Central Mumbai’ – Parel, Byculla, Lower Parel, Prabhadevi, etc. While commercially valuable to the city, the pervasive presence of the mills and labourers made the locations around them not attractive to the wealthy residents of Mumbai. That altered the preferred location for them to Malabar Hill.

The downward turn in the fortunes of the mills began after India’s Independence owing to government policies, technological advances, management and labour practices. The knock-out punch came about with the Great Bombay Textile Strike in 1982 when over 200,000 employees stopped work for a year. The purpose was to put pressure on mill owners to raise their wages. Strikes had been common earlier as well – in the 1928 strike, more than 135 working days were lost per industrial worker. The 1982 strike, however, lingered for almost a year and crushed an already battered industry. The mills shut down. Select mill owners found an escape owing to rising prices of the mill land. The National Textile Corporation that was set-up to take up the affairs of the sick textiles; the undertaking also found value through sale of majority land parcels. Twenty-one of the 78 closed mills were in Mumbai.
That sale of mill land, often with murky games, would result in some of the most prestigious commercial and residential towers being built. In terms of retail, there is little doubt that Phoenix Mills has become the torchbearer of mall development. In commercial office space, Peninsula Corporate Park stands out – making office buildings in the previous commercial business district of Nariman Point look old and worn out. In terms of residential towers, there is nothing that eclipses Lodha’s curtailed skyscraper – World Towers. There is the low-profile Ashford Casa Grande that appears to get better with age. The rich of Mumbai are gradually making their way from their old abode in South Bombay into these large gated communities.It is said that William Hornby commenced work on the integration of Bombay’s islands despite the rejection of the plan by the East India Company. The company responded by sending a suspension notice to him. With one phase of the project in its last lap, Hornby ignored the suspension notice and pushed for swift completion of the work. And in turn set the stage for a city that became a thriving metropolis. First – from reclamation. And then from – redevelopment.

Source: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/real-estate/hornbys-city-bombays-reclamation-to-mumbais-redevelopment-7840341.html