Town Hall is heritage landmark, we will keep it alive: Delhi Mayor Oberoi

A plan is afoot for refurbishment and potential reuse of the nearly 160-year-old Town Hall building in Chandni Chowk area, Delhi Mayor Shelly Oberoi said.

New Delhi: A plan is afoot for refurbishment and potential reuse of the nearly 160-year-old Town Hall building in Chandni Chowk area, Delhi Mayor Shelly Oberoi said, while emphasising that it is a “heritage landmark” and will be kept “alive”. Built in the 1860s, the Town Hall — the original headquarters of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi — had received a basic facelift over a period of few months preceding the G20 Summit in New Delhi.

Oberoi, who represented the MCD at the recently held Asia Pacific Cities Summit and Mayors’ Forum in Brisbane, Australia, told PTI here on Monday that she was impressed by the city’s “sanitation and cleanliness management and preservation of built heritage”. The urban summit took place from October 11-13 and was attended by over 1,000 delegates, including more than 100 mayors and deputy mayors.

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“The main summit took place at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre. And, a reception was held for delegates at the historic Brisbane City Hall, where the office of the Lord Mayor of the city is also located. The Brisbane City Hall is akin to our Town Hall,” Oberoi said.

Built between 1920 and 1930, Brisbane City Council’s heritage-listed City Hall sits in the heart of Brisbane City. It is one of Queensland’s most significant heritage and cultural icons. The City Hall has social and historical importance for locals, according to the website of the Council.

The Queensland Heritage Register and the National Trust of Queensland list City Hall as a “culturally, historically and architecturally significant building”. The City Hall closed its doors in January 2010 for restoration and re-opened to the public in April 2013.

The Delhi mayor was all praises for the capital city of Queensland, an eastern province of Australia, and described it as a “modern city with skyscrapers that has preserved its past as well” in the form of several iconic heritage buildings.

The Brisbane City Hall, the old Treasury building reused as a casino, Queensland’s Parliament House (built in 1860s), and many other structures are declared heritage buildings which are “very well-maintained”, she said.

Asked if there is a scope for redeveloping and reusing Delhi’s Town Hall on the lines of old buildings in Brisbane, Oberoi said, “Definitely, we are planning something.” “Also, we can do that (preserve old buildings), but for that we also need community participation, and people need to change their behaviour (towards old buildings),” she added.

“Our Town Hall is a heritage landmark and, we will keep it alive,” she said, adding, “for the Town Hall, we have something in mind, maybe in coming days we will disclose it”. Built with yellow-painted brick and stone and carved white stone trim, the Victorian-era Town Hall was originally used by the British to hold public meetings.

The Town Hall premises include the main building which has lawns on the front and back sides and is flanked by press building and dispensary building, which also have been freshly painted from outside.

The Town Hall, the construction of which was completed in 1866, was earlier called the Delhi Institute or the Lawrence Institute and it is still considered one of the most iconic buildings of the city. It is also a tourist attraction of old Delhi.

“The Town Hall was the original seat of the Delhi Municipality…it was bought by the municipality around 1866 for its use,” a senior official said.

The city municipality later evolved into the MCD which came into being in April 1958.

The Town Hall was the seat of the MCD from its inception in 1958 till 2009, and from April 2010, the headquarters was formally shifted to the swanky and towering Civic Centre complex — whose tallest block is 28-storey high — near New Delhi railway station.

A senior MCD official had said in August that a tender was floated earlier this year to carry out whitewashing of the building prior to the G20 Summit held on September 9-10, adding, it was not a full-scale conservation work as that would need a lot of funds.
The civic authorities have floated plans for its redevelopment as a heritage hotel or a cultural hub, on several occasions in the past 10 years, but nothing concrete has emerged so far.

The Brisbane summit’s main theme was ‘Shaping Cities for our Future’. It had three sub-themes — ‘Cities of Connection’, ‘Cities of Sustainability’ and ‘Cities of Legacy’. Under the ‘Cities of Legacy’, discussion was on “maintaining the legacy” of a city, and what a civic body can leave behind as a legacy with their work, Oberoi said.