Travel deals: double happiness with Siam Hotel/Dhara Dhevi offer; packages for sunny Sanya
Adam Nebbs
Said to be India's oldest surviving cast-iron building, the decaying Esplanade Mansion, in Mumbai - now no more than a crumbling slum - used to be regarded as one of the finest hotels (above) east of Suez. It was built in the 1860s, almost entirely with materials sent out by sailing ship from England. The cast-iron framework came from Derby, the bricks and cement from the banks of the River Thames, the tiles from Staffordshire, and the red-stone columns from Cumberland. The 130-room Watson's Hotel went into business in 1869 and was the place to stay until the opening of what is now the grand Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, in 1903. (It was said that industrialist Jamsetji Tata built the Taj in revenge for being barred from Watson's, though this has since been largely discredited.) Mark Twain checked-in in 1896, as did the Lumiere brothers, who gave India's first exhibition of moving pictures in the hotel. Watson's closed in the 1960s. The building was turned into flats and offices, and began falling apart soon after. In the 90s, Italian architect Renzo Piano took an interest in the building and, through his efforts, it was placed on a list of endangered monuments by the World Monuments Fund. Very soon after that, part of the building's façade collapsed, killing a passerby. Since then there have been a couple of promising reports about renovation of the old hotel, but red tape seems to have prevented work commencing. Red tape was, perhaps, also the only thing that kept the hotel standing, but it's now about to be stripped of its official heritage status, along with 1,000 other listed buildings and sites, under a new Mumbai development plan. The demolition of one of Asia's most historic hotels now appears to be inevitable.