A GBP85m redevelopment of Connaught Place, the historic commercial centre designed for imperial Delhi by the British Raj architect Robert Tor Russel, has run into a storm of criticism just as the first phase has been completed.

The restoration of the first of Connaught Place’s colonnaded neo-Paladian buildings was completed in August under the urban renewal project, which is due to be finished by July 2010. But the work has faced criticism from conservation architects as well as local traders.

On the architectural front, experts from the Delhi Urban Arts Commission discovered flaws, including misaligned decorative plaster and badly designed flooring, when they inspected the buildings. Workers are now correcting the mistakes.

The traders support the restoration but do not want the area to be converted into a pedestrian promenade and leisure hub. They were not consulted about the project and have now hired a conservation architect and petitioned Delhi’s lieutenant governor for their cause.

“Connaught Place has always been a commercial complex, so the municipality cannot change the historic character of the area and make it into a leisure centre,” said the conservation architect AGK Menon.

Inspired by Rome’s Coliseum and shaped like a horseshoe (to bring luck to all, it was said), providence has been particularly unkind to Delhi’s commercial hub. Among all the grand structures of a unique garden city that has come to be known as Lutyens’ Delhi, after its master architect, Edwin Lutyens, the two concentric rings of Connaught Place’s buildings, housing shops below and offices and residences above, have been the most ill-fated.

After the British left, draconian rent control laws, neglect by the municipal authorities, and the installation of an underground market at the tree-lined, 13-acre Connaught Circus, turned the once elegant site into a seedy, dilapidated eyesore. Even shoppers stayed away.

“It is only a question of time before the last vestiges of neo-Palladian architecture and imperial building are lost beneath cheap restaurants and new office blocks,” Andreas Volwahsen, an architectural historian, lamented in 2002. “Sadly, a town is being deprived of its most important economic foundations.”

However, three years later the opening of a Delhi Metro station under the Circus brought in many more visitors. Refurbished cinemas, stylish restaurants and stores have added to the bustle and glitz.—Dawn/Guardian News Service