General Post Office - G.P.O - Esplande Road

The G.P.O. the site for the construction of the building was finally selected in 1873 and the construction work entrusted to Mr. R.F. Chosolm. Construction started in 1874. The magnificent, red-painted 55,000-square foot General Post Office building might be described as a Victorian County-Colonial or Victorian Gothic-Colonial overlay on Indo-Saracenic. This building, yet another Chisholm design with 125-foot tall twin towers, was built on the site of the Abercrombie Battery at a cost of about Rs. 8 lakh.

 

 
The twin towers once sported the Kerala roof-influenced ‘caps’ Chisholm favoured atop the towers, after his building assignments in Travancore, but is now ‘capless’, the ‘caps’ having been removed after a storm in mid-20th Century
The building, however began to reverberate with full-blooded activity, when the Post Office, moved on 26/4/1884 Saturday, and business was thrown open to the public at 11.00 am that day
 

Comments

  1. joshua29 May 2011 at 07:36

    Nice pictures ... Our PWDepartment is good in maintaining public buildings. That is the portfolio either held by the CM or given to a loyalist .... make lot of money!

    ReplyDelete

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