Cannaught Place

                                        Connaught Place 

Connaught Place

About

About

Connaught Place is one of the largest financial, commercial and business centers in New Delhi, India. It is often abbreviated as CP and houses the headquarters of several noted Indian firms. The main commercial area of the new city, New Delhi, during the erstwhile British Raj, its environs occupy a place of pride in the city and are counted among the top heritage structures in New Delhi. It was developed as a showpiece of Lutyens' Delhi with a prominent Central Business District.

Named after Prince Arthur, 1st Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, construction work began in 1929 and was completed in 1933. A metro railway station built under it is named Rajiv Chowk  (after Rajiv Gandhi).

History

 Prior to the construction of Connaught Place, the area was a ridge, covered with kikar trees and populated with jackals and wild pigs. Residents of the Kashmere Gate, Civil Lines area visited during the weekends for partridge hunting.The Hanuman Temple attracted many visitors from the old walled city, who came only on Tuesdays and Saturdays and before sunset, as the return trip was considered dangerous.

history

Residents of villages including Madhoganj, Jaisingh Pura, and Raja ka Bazaar were evicted to clear the area for the construction of Connaught Place and the development of its nearby areas. The villages were once situated along the historic Qutb Road, the main road connecting Shahjahanabad, the walled city of Delhi (now known as Old Delhi) to Qutb Minar in south Delhi since the Mughal era. The displaced people were relocated in Karol Bagh to the west, a rocky area populated only by trees and wild bushes. However, three structures were spared demolition. These were Hanuman temple, a Jain temple in Jaisinghpura and the Jantar Mantar.

Construction

Plans to have a central business district were developed as the construction of the new capital of Imperial India began to take shape. Headed by W.h. Nicholls, the chief architect of the Government of India, the plans featured a central plaza based on the European Renaissance and in the Classical style. However, Nicholls left India in 1917 and with Lutyens and Baker busy working on larger buildings in the capital, design of the plaza eventually fell to Robert Tor Russell, chief architect to the Public Works Department (PWD), Government of India.

Construction

Named after Prince Arthur, 1st Duke of Connaught(1850–1942), third son of Queen Victoria and uncle of King George VI of England, who visited India in 1921 and laid the foundation of the Council House (now Sansad Bhavan, or Parliament House).

Connaught Place's Georgian architecture is modeled after the Royal Crescent in Bath, designed by the architect John Wood the Younger and built between 1767 and 1774. While the Royal Crescent is semi-circular and a three-storied residential structure, Connaught Place had only two floors, which made almost a complete circle intended to house commercial establishments on the ground with residential space on the first floor. The circle was eventually designed with two concentric circles, creating an Inner Circle, Middle Circle and the Outer Circle with seven roads radiating from a circular central park. As per the original plan, the different blocks of Connaught Place were to be joined from above, employing archways, with radial roads below them. However, the circle was 'broken up' to give it a grander scale. Even the blocks were originally planned to be 172 meters (564 ft) in height but later reduced to the present two-storied structure with an open colonnade.