Town Hall

Category: British Monument
Visiting time: 11am – 5 pm; Monday closed
Admission fee: Tuesday to Friday : Rs.10. Saturday, Sunday & Other Holidays : Rs.15. School Groups: Rs.5 from Tuesday to Friday.
Nearest Railway Station: Howrah
Nearest Metro Station: Chandni Chowk/ Esplanade
Nearest International Airport: Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport.
Approximate time required for sightseeing: 1 hour
Parking: Hourly parking charges applicable.
Contact: Kolkata Museum Society, Town Hall, 4, Esplanade Row (West) Kolkata—700001; Telephone: (+91)-(33)-2248 3085, 2213 1098.

Marked as a national heritage building, and constructed in the year 1811 by a British Colonel John Garstin, with the purpose to serve as a central meeting place for large gatherings, the Kolkata Town Hall is now home to a Municipal Court, a government run food-rationing department and the Kolkata Panorama. Built in the grand Tuscan-Doric order of the Palladian style of architecture, it is witness to an eventful past, when the most important meetings took place under its roof, including the felicitation of Rabindranath Tagore following his winning the Nobel Prize in 1813 and the historic public gathering for the protest against the division of Bengal in 1905.

The Kolkata Panorama, or the Calcutta Museum, added to the Town Hall in 2002, is India’s first high-tech story-telling museum, on the history of the city of Kolkata. It tells an almost complete story of Kolkata, noting all aspects of the city’s growth, from the social to the political. It involves the visitors directly through the enticing audio-visuals, which successfully recreate scenes from the city’s past. It ends with a glorious declaration of Kolkata as the country’s cultural capital. The Museum also houses a library and an archive with a massive collection of rare books on Kolkata. Educational and other informative events regularly take place here.