Marine Drive: How Mumbai Built Its Art Deco Seafront

How Marine Drive was built: the Backbay reclamation, Mumbai's Art Deco seafront of the 1930s, the Queen's Necklace and the 2018 UNESCO World Heritage listing.

A Silverfox Studios Perspective ON

October 16, 2026

· 5 min read

^{HOW A TROUBLED LAND RECLAMATION SCHEME PRODUCED ONE OF THE WORLD'S LARGEST ART DECO ENSEMBLES}

Marine Drive curving along Back Bay in Mumbai in the evening — Marine Drive, Mumbai, in the evening. Image: A.Savin (FAL), via Wikimedia Commons

Marine Drive is the seafront road that curves for about three kilometres around Back Bay in South Mumbai, from Nariman Point to Chowpatty. It runs along land reclaimed from the Arabian Sea under the Backbay Reclamation Scheme, and the plots behind it were built up in the 1930s and 1940s with apartment blocks in the Art Deco style. Thirty-four Art Deco buildings on Marine Drive are part of the Victorian Gothic and Art Deco Ensembles of Mumbai, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site on 30 June 2018. The arc of streetlights along the road gives it its other name, the Queen's Necklace. The seafront came out of a colonial reclamation project that ran into serious trouble, the arrival of reinforced cement concrete, and Indian clients and architects who adopted Art Deco for their homes, cinemas and offices.

^{WHAT WAS THE BACKBAY RECLAMATION SCHEME?}

Bombay's Back Bay shoreline in the 1870s — Bombay's Back Bay in the 1870s, before the 20th-century reclamation. Image: Unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons

Bombay had considered filling in Back Bay before. According to the journalist Sidharth Bhatia, writing for the Art Deco Mumbai Trust, a similar plan in the 1860s was abandoned after the economic crash that followed the American Civil War. The ICOMOS evaluation for the World Heritage nomination likewise records reclamation at Back Bay starting in the 1860s and stalling when the cotton boom ended. After a plague outbreak, the colonial administration looked for ways to relieve the crowded city, and the Bombay City Improvement Trust reclaimed the land that became Cuffe Parade. That project became the model for a much larger scheme across Back Bay, which UNESCO describes as the second expansion of the city and the opportunity for Bombay to expand to the west.

Sources give different dates for the scheme. Bhatia dates the start to 1919, the Art Deco Society of New York gives November 1920 to 1929, and the ICOMOS evaluation dates the Backbay Reclamation Scheme to 1928 to 1942, describing it as absorbing earlier failed or unfinished projects. Stone and earth were quarried in Kandivali, brought by train and dumped into the sea, but dredging proved inadequate and the work could not be finished in five years. By the early 1920s the project was considered a failure and led to an official inquiry. The nationalist lawyer Khurshed Framji Nariman led public criticism, and newspapers called it "Lloyd's folly" and "Buchanan's blunder", after a governor and an engineer. Nariman Point was named after him decades later. Only four of the eight planned blocks were recommended for completion, and Blocks I and II, at the northern end, are now the Art Deco precinct.

^{WHEN WAS MARINE DRIVE BUILT?}

The built frontage followed the reclamation in stages. The Art Deco Society of New York records that the Oval Maidan was developed in the early 1930s, with Marine Drive following soon after, and puts the reclaimed land available for building at 439.6 acres. Plots facing the sea were assigned mainly to residential use. The ICOMOS evaluation dates the first Art Deco block, facing the Oval Maidan and Churchgate, to the early 1930s, and says the style was extended in the 1940s to Marine Drive, which became the densest concentration of Art Deco buildings in Mumbai. Bhatia notes that Art Deco buildings line only about a third of the full drive.

Soona Mahal, at the junction of Churchgate and Marine Drive, was completed in 1937, and Bhatia records that Dhun Lentin's family moved into it in 1939. It was built for Kawasji Fakirji Sidhwa, who ran a country liquor business, and named after his wife, Soona bai. Bhatia lists Oceana, Shalimar, Riviera, St James Court and Chateau Marine among the building names chosen by the developers of the drive. Sea Green South Hotel was commissioned for the army and security services during the Second World War, and newspaper advertisements of the early 1940s offered new flats at around 250 rupees a month, a rent beyond most of the city's residents. In the same decades modernist cinemas and offices went up elsewhere in the city, including the Eros and Liberty cinemas and the New India Assurance building of 1936 at Fort.

^{WHY DOES MUMBAI HAVE SO MUCH ART DECO ARCHITECTURE?}

Art Deco facade of the Regal Cinema, Mumbai — The Regal Cinema in Colaba, Mumbai. Image: Rangan Datta Wiki (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons

The Art Deco Society of New York describes Mumbai's Art Deco buildings as one of the largest and most homogeneous such groups in Asia and the world. The Art Deco Mumbai Trust attributes the scale of the building boom to several factors arriving together: the new land from the Backbay reclamation, a growing population, the rising aspirations of the middle class, wider education and international exposure. The emergence of reinforced cement concrete as a construction material, and the availability of cement in large quantities, made the style practical for apartment blocks as well as public buildings.

Patronage was the other factor. The Art Deco Society of New York says Art Deco entered India through Bombay thanks to Indian princely statesmen, merchants and entrepreneurs, and the Trust notes that the city's Art Deco was funded, built, designed and lived in largely by Indians. Bhatia adds that the style appealed to Indian merchants and professionals who were turning away from the architecture of the Raj. Cinemas, social clubs, schools, hospitals and apartments all adopted it. The Regal cinema of 1933 was the city's first Art Deco building. In November 1937 the Ideal Home Exhibition was held at Town Hall. It was India's first architectural exhibition and introduced the public to new styles, furniture and building materials.

^{THE ARCHITECTS OF BOMBAY DECO}

The Art Deco Mumbai Trust distinguishes between the two halves of the listed area by who built them. The Victorian buildings were driven by British architects and engineers, although Indians provided much of the funding and construction. The Art Deco city was the work of a wider group: European artists, British planners, American and Indian architects and engineers, and Indian craftspeople. Among the Indian architects the Trust names are Gajanan Baburao Mhatre, Merwanji Bana, Sohrabji Bhedwar and the firm of Master, Sathe and Bhuta, which designed the New India Assurance building. Bhedwar designed and built the Eros cinema.

Mhatre is the architect most closely tied to the Oval and Marine Drive. Born in 1902, he studied at the Sir JJ School of Art in Bombay, went to England in 1928 to qualify as an associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects and returned in 1931, when he joined the firm of Poonager and Bilimoria. His Oval Maidan work includes Sunshine (1936) and the V-shaped corner building Empress Court. The Trust credits him as largely responsible for the design of Soona Mahal, although the commission went to the firm of Suvernpatki and Vora, with Mhatre as consulting architect. He later served as president of the Indian Institute of Architects from 1955 to 1957 and died in 1973.

^{WHAT MAKES BOMBAY DECO DIFFERENT?}

Row of Art Deco apartment buildings on Marine Drive, Mumbai — The Sonawala Building (right) and other Art Deco buildings on Marine Drive. Image: DesiBoy101 (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons

UNESCO's statement of Outstanding Universal Value says Mumbai's Art Deco buildings blended Indian design with Art Deco imagery, producing a local style known as Indo-Deco whose influence spread across the subcontinent. The Art Deco Society of New York describes ornament in Bombay Deco as minimal and geometrically driven, with banding, relief patterns, motifs and stylised lettering in wood, metal, stone and plaster. It locates the most decorative examples mainly in northern suburbs such as Dadar and Matunga, where the eyebrow shades of Shiv Shanti Bhuvan and the window grilles of Nalini Kunj are typical details. In South Mumbai the Eros cinema is partly clad in red Agra sandstone, with a ziggurat-like tower that makes it look taller than it is.

Construction methods also left a mark. Bhatia lists the elements of the style that appealed to Bombay's clients: reinforced concrete, stucco fronts, curving balconies and no Corinthian columns. Because much of the work was done by hand, the Society notes, Indian Art Deco has a handmade quality that sets it apart from Western examples. Soona Mahal shows the typical features: a streamlined design, deep cantilevered balconies, vertical accents and a rooftop turret with a circular viewing gallery, with an original lift, carved wooden stairwells and coloured marble cladding inside. The Art Deco Mumbai Trust describes it as one of the most authentic Art Deco structures along Marine Drive.

^{THE 2018 UNESCO LISTING OF MUMBAI'S ART DECO ENSEMBLE}

Cricket on the Oval Maidan with the Bombay High Court behind — Cricket on the Oval Maidan, with the Bombay High Court building beyond. Image: Rangan Datta Wiki (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons

UNESCO describes two waves of development behind the listed area. The first, in the 1880s, produced a group of Victorian Gothic public buildings and the Oval Maidan. The ICOMOS evaluation traces the open ground to the Esplanade, cleared as a defensive field in 1772 and widened in 1804. The second wave was the Backbay reclamation in the early 20th century, which created the Marine Drive sea front and its Art Deco frontage. The two groups face each other across the Maidan: the Victorian buildings on the east, with the Rajabai Clock Tower as the visual high point, and the Art Deco buildings on the west. UNESCO notes that the Victorian architects combined Gothic Revival forms with Indian elements and added balconies and verandas suited to the climate.

India placed the ensemble on its Tentative List in 2012 and submitted the nomination dossier in 2014, prepared by the conservation architects Abha Narain Lambah Associates. The World Heritage Committee inscribed it on 30 June 2018 at its 42nd session in Manama, Bahrain, under criterion (ii), for the exchange of European and Indian values it represents, and criterion (iv), for showing developments in architecture and urban planning over two centuries. The property covers 66.34 hectares with a buffer zone of 378.78 hectares and includes 94 buildings, protected under the 1995 Heritage Regulations for Greater Bombay (DCR 67).

The Committee's decision also set out work still needed. It asked India to complete the 2013 inventory of buildings, protect the setting and the skyline dominance of the Rajabai Clock Tower from development pressure, urgently conserve the former Watson's Hotel, now Esplanade Mansions, and revitalise the Eros, which no longer operates as a cinema. Bhatia points to an older pressure on the Marine Drive buildings: the Bombay Rent Control Act of 1947, which froze rents at their 1940s levels for decades.

^{TRIDENT, NARIMAN POINT ON MARINE DRIVE}

Lobby lounge with patterned carpet, fluted timber columns and floor-to-ceiling windows at Trident, Nariman Point — Trident, Nariman Point, Mumbai, India

Trident, Nariman Point sits on Marine Drive in South Mumbai, facing the Arabian Sea. The 35-storey hotel opened on 7 April 1973 as the Oberoi-Sheraton. On completion it was the tallest building in South Asia, a position it held until 1980. It took the Trident name in 2008 under The Oberoi Group. The hotel takes its name from Nariman Point, one end of the three-kilometre drive. It opened 36 years after Soona Mahal was completed further along the same seafront.

Silverfox Studios led the refurbishment of four public spaces in the hotel: the arrival reception, the lobby lounge, Ness Bar, and the ballroom and event spaces. The work was completed in 2025 around a "Luxury Lifestyle" concept. Ness Bar, on Level 1, has views over Marine Drive and the sea: the promenade laid out on the Backbay reclamation, the curve of streetlights known as the Queen's Necklace and the Art Deco frontage that UNESCO listed in 2018. The Art Deco Mumbai Trust counts 34 listed buildings on Marine Drive itself, against 18 in the Oval precinct.