KARACHI: Bristol bliss

Published August 10, 2009

HAVE you ever fallen in love with a building? Worry not if you are a flinty-eyed, stone-hearted person one look at the Bristol Hotel will make you go wonky in the knees. Despite being a 100-year-old piece of architecture, its beauty will blow you away big balconies, carved balusters, delectable arcading, eye-catching windows, a nice entrance leading straight into what would once have been the reception office, high ceilings, a wooden staircase that seems to be holding on...it's a sight to marvel at.

Nestled between modern-day apartment buildings on two of its sides, an imposing flyover at its back and a railway track that snakes through the southern part of Karachi to its left, the Bristol Hotel these days cuts a peculiar picture. If the railway track symbolises the fleetness of time, the high-rise flats speak of contemporariness. And the Bristol Hotel serves as a bridge between the temporal and the eternal.

Not just that, the unclothed children taking a bath at the base of the flyover, garbage dumps along the railway track and slick-looking cars entering the compounds of apartment buildings give the whole area an oxymoronic feel. That's what Karachi has metamorphosed into a Kafkan situation without reason.

If you are a first-time visitor to the Bristol, what will instantly strike you is the palatial size of the edifice. It's no longer a hotel now. Hasn't been used so for the last 15 or 20 years. There is a chance that while paying a visit to its dining room you might trip over a cable wire or stumble into an HMI light, because television crews find this place fitting to shoot their soap operas and period dramas. And the activity is confined to the ground and first floors; the second and third storeys are not in use.The reason for the spaciousness of the structure is, or could be, that it was originally constructed in 1907 (some say 1910) as a mansion for a well-to-do Parsi by the name of Dossabhai Byramji Minwalla. It was the first three-storey structure of the vicinity.

A few accounts suggest it was built as part of the quartet of railway hotels to provide accommodation to those arriving in Karachi by train. The other three accommodations were the North Western, the Carlton and the Killarney hotels.

According to an old man, Shahbaz, who works at the hotel and is not always keen on getting the building photographed, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah had graced the hotel on at least one occasion, and dined here. Back then the facility was known for its sumptuous cuisine, which is difficult to dispute.

At present the Bristol Hotel is not in a shape that should call for urgent measures, but it definitely needs to be looked after in a skilled manner.

Architect Arif Hasan says “At the time of its construction, 'railway' had become popularised. There were other hotels in the same area. I don't know whether the Quaid-i-Azam dined or stayed at the Bristol, but there was another accommodation, the Carlton Hotel, about which I've heard that Mr Jinnah was the first non-English person to have stayed there. Apart from that, there was the Grand Café, which the who's who of the region used to frequent.

“There are no classical elements used in the construction of the Bristol Hotel. It's made in the style of Europe's coastal city architecture. It is a pretty good-looking building, having colourful cornices, crisscross window treatment and carved balusters,” says Mr Hasan. The architect says that there was a time when the whole of the Civil Lines locality used to have similar structures.

“I've always maintained that preserving or conserving just a few buildings doesn't do much. We need to preserve neighbourhoods so that our coming generation has a sense of history. If you don't have a sense of history it will become difficult for you to progress in life. Neighbourhoods tell you who you are,” says Mr Hasan.

As for the name of the hotel, not much is known about it. There are two possibilities the English city of Bristol or it could well have something to do with the fourth Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, Frederick Harvey, a peregrinator who was fond of high-quality hospitality.

Studying the subject may give you the indication that prior to 1870 no such site existed, but strangely Charles Dickens in his novel Bleak House (published in 1851) mentions a certain Hotel Bristol in the Place Vendome in Chapter 12.

P.S. In 1937, Leon Trotsky was accused of hatching a plot against Stalin at the Bristol in Copenhagen. But then they found out that at the time when they thought the conspiracy was being made, the hotel was there only as a fond memory, because in the second decade of the 20th century it had been razed to the ground, and was rebuilt in 1936.

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