Yellow stone Gothic Revival buildings and colonnaded shopfronts surround a domed covered market with its own clock tower.
What Saddar looks like
fills a domed block where meets Preedy Street, a yellow stone covered hall with cusped arches and a 140-foot clock tower studded with carved leopard heads. Vendors set out baskets and awnings in the four courtyard galleries inside, with more stalls lining the pavement along the street outside.
stands a short walk away on its own lawns. Its yellow limestone front is cut with pointed arches, quatrefoils and flying buttresses in the Venetian Gothic style. The building dates from the 1860s, and its reading rooms and exhibition galleries still sit under the same stone vaults the hall was built with.
runs for 1.1 km from Garden Square to Inverarity Road, its shopfronts set under arcades of Roman arches like those along the side streets off M.A. Jinnah Road. Two to four storey buildings line the street with carved wood and metal balconies above the shutters, rusticated stone around the doors and windows.
Hawker stalls and folding tables crowd the sidewalks under the arcades, with roll down shutters marking the shopfronts closed for the day. 's twin spires rise over a marble staircase a few streets east, its stone facade pale against the trees around the forecourt.
Shot in Saddar
For Na Maloom Afraad, director Nabeel Qureshi shot a strike sequence directly in Saddar's own market streets rather than on a built set. The production closed the district for a day, parking cars and burning tyres among the real shopfronts.
Na Maloom Afraad, 2014
The production bought five cars and a bus and laid out about seventy tyres on the street overnight, burning them the next morning among the colonial era shopfronts. News vans arrived during the burning and ran it as breaking news, while the crew stood at the corners telling passersby it was a film shoot.
The University of Mumbai's Rajabai Clock Tower is cut from the same buff coloured Kurla stone in a Venetian Gothic style close to Frere Hall's own. A few streets away, Crawford Market is a covered market hall in the same stone with Victorian Gothic arches. It dates from 1869, well before Empress Market. Crawford Market has no clock tower of its own, so a wide shot matching Empress Market's skyline needs the university campus instead. Mumbai's wider streets and denser modern towers show in anything beyond a tight frame. Try searching buff stone Gothic market now.
Esplanade in Kolkata, West Bengal
New Market is a Victorian Gothic covered market complex at Dharmatala in Kolkata's Esplanade area. It dates from 1874, well before Empress Market. Its own clock tower stands at the southern end, shipped from Huddersfield and installed in the 1930s. New Market's tower sits apart from the market roofline rather than rising from the centre of it, so a wide shot needs to choose one or the other rather than frame both the way Empress Market allows. Kolkata's tram wires and denser modern signage need keeping out of frame. Try searching Victorian Gothic covered market now.
