Cantonment
Colonial Chronicles: A Walk through Camp
कॅम्पमधली वसाहतकालीन पुणे
Two miles and two centuries from the peths. Basalt churches, wrought-iron verandahs, Irani bakeries and East Street — the other Pune, built by an empire and kept alive by everyone who came after it.
After 1817 the British built their cantonment east of the old city, and in doing so built a second Pune with its own street grid, its own architecture and its own food.
This walk takes in the churches and bungalows, the deep verandahs and louvred shutters designed for a climate the builders found trying, and the commercial street that grew up to serve them. We look at how Parsi, Irani, Bohri, Goan Catholic and Jewish families made the cantonment theirs — and at the bakeries and cafés that are the most delicious surviving evidence.
It is a good walk for understanding why Pune feels like two cities stitched together, and why the seam is so easy to find once you know what to look for.
On this walk
- Cantonment planning: why the streets run the way they do
- Colonial bungalow architecture and its climate logic
- Churches, clubs and the institutions of garrison life
- The Parsi, Irani and Bohri communities of Camp
- Classic Pune food joints — and the history in them
Keep walking
Other routes
Kasba Peth & Budhwar Peth
Kasba is the oldest peth in the city and Budhwar grew up beside it. Together they hold Pune's founding temple, its densest surviving wada fabric, and its most complicated present.
Pataleshwar Caves
A whole temple cut downward out of one sheet of Deccan basalt, twelve hundred years ago, when this was not Pune yet but the village of Bhamburda. Ten minutes from JM Road, and most Punekars have never been inside.
Timeless Tales of Laxmi Road
Pune had a shopping street sixty years before it had a mall. Laxmi Road is retail, ritual, architecture and civic history all running along the same kilometre.