The first planned municipal market of Patna, designed by architect Joseph Fearis Munnings in 1912, popularly known as the ‘Gole Market’, was demolished in June 2019. The demolition was done as part of a major redevelopment project of the Patna railway station area under the Smart City initiative. Other markets lining the streets were also knocked down as part of the mega project. The more-than-a-century-old Gole Market in Patna was listed as a heritage building in a Bihar government publication in 2008, Patna: A Monumental History.
The unique single-storey building had a raised central hexagonal core top with elegant red-tiled roof and two projecting flanks again topped with red tiles of the colonial-era, Burn & Co. Architect Munnings had designed it while planning the layout of the ‘New Capital’ city of colonial Patna after the creation of the new province of Bihar and Orissa in 1912. In its heydays, it had a rose garden around it and six routes leading to it from the streets around it. The upper class Indians and the British would visit the place in their cars.
The razed building ground is to witness a seven-storeyed commercial complex and a modern municipal market along with a vending zone near Patna Junction railway station. The municipal authorities have assured that the iron shell of the building and whatever can be salvaged would be stored and later reused in a new gazebo at the site. The history of the building, along with old pictures, would be displayed there, so that people will know there had been a Gole Market there.
Many heritage lovers were shocked and angered by this move of the Patna Municipal Corporation (PMC). They had placed their suggestions to the municipal authorities to preserve the building and use it as a café by making modifications in the master plan of the Smart City project. They have criticised the local government for knocking down heritage buildings in the city, thus erasing the colonial history of Patna in the name of development. In December 2018, the 133-year-old Anjuman Islamia Hall, perhaps the first public hall of Patna, was demolished to make way for a modern complex.
Gole Market had faced decades of neglect as local authorities had planned a redevelopment project much earlier too, which kept on getting stalled.
According to the PMC, Gole Market was proving a hurdle to the layout of the Smart City project plan. Though it was designed 100 years ago as the first municipal market, there was not much ‘heritage’ value as such attached to it.