‘Old Colombo’ and our heritage

Chanaka Bandarage’s article, ‘We are killing Pettah,’ on 15 December FT is of particular interest to me. I would love to share with him some of my own responses to what I called ‘Old Colombo’ – although mine were more about the built environment than the bustling life he evokes so vividly. 

In 1978, I spent many hours, on Sundays, walking about and photographing areas like Pettah – accompanied by the young architect, Anjalendran, just graduated from Katubedde. He ‘carried my notebook’ in those days before he had become the excellent and famous architect he is now and also interpreted for me the Tamil of some of the people who invited us into their homes, etc. In some streets, beyond Pettah – Moor St., Messenger St., they showed us fascinating architectural details, like light-wells, internal courtyards, doors between adjacent houses, to offset the problems of living in such densely-populated areas.

I was provoked to visit such areas after seeing demolition commence, around 1978, of the old Employment Exchange in Fort, revealing, in the process, the very fine, late-19th-century (I think.... can’t quite recall now) original. Its elegant wooden columns and fine mal-lalis had long been boarded up by brick and asbestos coverings.

The initial result was a couple of newspaper articles and then a longer monograph with 50/60 photos, late 1978, copies of which I sent to the Architecture School at Katubedde. I was urging conservation policy for what I called ‘Old Colombo’ in the face of what appeared to be a decision to erase much of it. 

And, in fact, a few months later, PM Premadasa announced: “The whole of Fort would be redone. Old buildings were being pulled down and would be replaced by new structures.” (CDN 2/3/79).

A campaign for conservation grew, but, alas, it was a losing battle. It is years now since I visited Pettah or anywhere around there. I wish I had the energy to go, just one last time.

An abbreviated version of my longer article was carried in ‘Monumentum’, the journal of ICOMOS, in June 1982. I must read it again to see if could be of any interest to Mr Bandarage, though I’d prefer to share the original with him. 

I hope his article gets wider circulation and helps to wake us up before we destroy much more of our heritage. Though I am not optimistic at all about a government that plonks down a new, concrete stupa in the middle of an ancient site. 

I wonder what the going rate is now for a square metre in Pettah – in dollars, of course.

Manel Fonseka