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2026-08-255 min readThe Mumbai Destinations editorial team

Mumbai holds one of the world's largest concentrations of Art Deco architecture — well over a thousand documented buildings — and these eight, in order, are the ones worth crossing the city for.

Why this city and how to look at it

Between roughly 1930 and 1950 Bombay's Indian business families built in Deco while the colonial administration was still building in Gothic revival, which is why the Oval Maidan has Victorian courts on one side and streamlined apartment blocks on the other. That confrontation is what UNESCO inscribed in 2018 as the Victorian Gothic and Art Deco Ensembles of Mumbai. The Art Deco Mumbai Trust has since catalogued well over a thousand buildings across the island city, from Churchgate to Dadar and Matunga, most of them still lived in rather than curated.

Look for four tells: horizontal "speed lines" in the plaster, a vertical fin or ziggurat crown over the entrance, curved corner balconies with ship-rail balustrades, and nautical or cinematic names in cast letters — Sea Green, Soona Mahal, Empress Court. Almost all of these are private residential buildings, so the viewing happens from the pavement; do not walk into lobbies uninvited. The whole ranking below is walkable in two morning sessions of about two hours each, best done between 7am and 10am when the low light rakes across the facades and the traffic noise is bearable.

1. Eros Cinema, Churchgate

Nothing else in the city says Deco as loudly. Completed in 1938 as part of the Cambata Building and designed by Sohrabji Bhedwar, Eros steps back in red Agra sandstone and cream plaster from a curved corner opposite Churchgate station, its stepped tower reading like a Manhattan setback compressed into one block. Even in the ten seconds it takes to cross the road from the station, the massing does its job — this is the building that photographs put on postcards, and it deserves the top slot on presence alone.

The catch is access. The auditorium and its lobby have been through long periods of closure and restoration work, so treat the interior as a bonus rather than a plan and check whether it is screening before you build an evening around it. From the outside, stand on the traffic island at the junction of Maharshi Karve Road and Veer Nariman Road for the full three-quarter view, then walk south along the Oval. If you have only one hour in the city for architecture, spend it on this corner and the block behind it.

2. The Oval Maidan row: Empress Court, Court View, Palm Court

The single greatest Deco street wall in Asia runs along Maharshi Karve Road facing the Oval Maidan, and it is a row rather than a building: Empress Court, Court View, Palm Court, Sunshine, Rajjab Mahal and their neighbours, built through the late 1930s for the new Backbay reclamation plots. Curved balconies stack up in fives and sixes; the names sit in relief above the entrances; and behind you the Gothic spires of the High Court and Rajabai Clock Tower complete the argument about two architectural centuries facing each other across a cricket ground.

Do this stretch on foot from the Churchgate end southwards, about 900 metres, ideally while a maidan match is underway so you get the foreground the buildings were designed against. Look up at the corner balconies for eyebrow ledges and porthole windows. These are working residential co-operatives with unglamorous shopfronts at ground level, so photograph the upper floors and keep out of the driveways. It ranks second only because it is a composition, not a single monument — as an experience it may be the best 20 minutes on this list.

3. New India Assurance Building, Fort

At 87 Mahatma Gandhi Road in Fort, the 1936 New India Assurance Building by Master, Sathe and Bhuta is the finest example of the city's hybrid style, where Deco geometry carries Indian figurative sculpture. Tall pilasters run the full height; between them, N.G. Pansare's relief figures — a potter, a weaver, a farmer, seated in stylised panels — turn a commercial office block into a statement about Indian industry financing itself. It is the one building here that rewards standing still for five minutes and reading the sculpture rather than the massing.

It sits mid-block, so the view is oblique; cross to the far pavement near the Kala Ghoda end for the best angle, and go on a Sunday morning when the parked cars thin out. The interior is a working office and not a visit. Combine it with the ten-minute walk to Kala Ghoda for the Jehangir Art Gallery and the Knesset Eliyahoo synagogue. Of everything on this list, this is the building most visitors walk past without noticing, which is exactly why it earns third place.

4. Liberty Cinema, New Marine Lines

Liberty opened in 1949, late enough to be described as the city's Deco swansong, with a fin-topped facade on Marine Lines and an interior of gold-flecked ceilings, curved balcony fronts and a lobby that still smells faintly of a mid-century picture palace. It was built for Hindi film premieres and its scale — over a thousand seats originally — belongs to an era before multiplexes chopped audiences into hundreds. It ranks fourth because the interior, when open, is the most intact Deco room a visitor can actually stand inside.

Programming is intermittent: the hall hosts festivals, screenings and private events rather than daily shows, so check what is on and book ahead rather than turning up. If it is dark, the facade and the entrance canopy are still worth the five-minute detour from Marine Lines station, and Metro Cinema at Dhobi Talao — Thomas Lamb's 1938 design for MGM, now a multiplex behind a preserved shell — is a ten-minute walk further north. Between the two, Liberty is the one with the soul; Metro is the one you can reliably get into.

5. Regal Cinema, Colaba

Regal, at the Colaba Causeway roundabout, was the city's first Deco cinema when it opened in 1933 — Charles Stevens outside, Czech artist Karl Schara's mirrored and sunburst interiors inside — and it is the easiest on the list to visit, because it still runs commercial shows at ordinary Mumbai ticket prices, often in the ₹150-350 band depending on the film and the day. Buying a matinee ticket for a film you half care about is the cheapest way to sit inside a 1930s Bombay auditorium.

As architecture it is less ambitious than Eros — a squarer block, a busier junction, and decades of signage — which is why it lands fifth. But its position makes it the natural anchor for a Colaba walk: the Prince of Wales Museum, Jehangir Art Gallery, Elphinstone College and the Gateway are all within 700 metres. Verify showtimes with the cinema on the day; single-screen programming changes weekly. Skip the surrounding pavement stalls selling "antique" film posters unless you enjoy negotiating over reprints.

6. Soona Mahal and the Marine Drive crescent

Marine Drive's seafront arc is a Deco ensemble in its own right, and Soona Mahal — the curved, cream-and-teal apartment block at the corner of Veer Nariman Road, with a restaurant on the ground floor — is its hinge. Walk north from Churchgate and the sequence unfolds: Zaver Mahal, Kapur Mahal, Sea Green South and Sea Green, Chateau Marine, each with rounded corner windows and ship-deck balconies facing the Arabian Sea. The salt air has been unkind to the plaster, which is part of what makes it look lived-in rather than restored.

Do it as a walk of about 2.5 km from Nariman Point to Girgaon Chowpatty, allowing an hour with stops, and go either at 7am or in the last hour before sunset so the facades are lit rather than glaring. The seaward promenade gives you the composition; the landward pavement gives you the detail. It ranks sixth because you are looking at a streetscape rather than a masterpiece, but no other city offers three kilometres of continuous 1930s sea-facing apartment blocks.

7. Dhanraj Mahal, Apollo Bunder

Behind the Gateway of India, Dhanraj Mahal spreads over a whole block in stepped, fortress-like tiers, designed in the 1930s by Ballardie, Thompson and Mathews for a princely client and now a mix of apartments, offices and small shops. The interest is the massing rather than the ornament: deep shaded verandas, a stone-and-plaster palette that answers the Taj across the road, and internal courtyards you can glimpse from the entrance arches without trespassing. It reads as Deco doing the job that a palace would once have done.

See it in the same 20 minutes as the Gateway, before the boat crowds build after 9am. Then walk five minutes to the Colaba end for Regal, closing a neat southern loop. Seventh place is a fair reflection of how hard it is to photograph — the block is too big for one frame and too hemmed in for a clean elevation. Do not pay a guide for it; there is nothing to be let into, and the value is in noticing it at all while everyone else queues for a ferry ticket.

8. The suburban Deco of Matunga, Dadar and Shivaji Park

The eighth entry is a whole neighbourhood. When the island city filled up, middle-class Deco moved north to the planned layouts of Matunga, Dadar Parsi Colony and the streets radiating from Shivaji Park, where 1930s and 1940s low-rise blocks carry curved staircase towers, coloured terrazzo, and stained-glass fanlights over their doors. There is no ticket, no famous facade and no crowd; there is a leafy grid you can walk for 90 minutes, punctuated by an Udupi breakfast at King's Circle for ₹150-300.

It ranks last because it demands the most from you: a 20-30 minute train or metro trip from the southern sights, no signage, and no single building that will make anyone gasp. But it is where the style stopped being a statement and became ordinary housing, and it is the part of the story the guidebooks omit. If your trip has only one architecture morning in it, spend it on the Oval and Marine Drive; if it has two, come here for the second and finish with filter coffee.

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