Heritage Watch: Remember the Traffic Commissioner’s Office at Vepery?

If you are of a generation that acquired its driving licence in the 1960s and 1970s, you would know this building very well. And if you are a child of that era, chances are you were taken to the traffic park that fronted it. Our OLD shows the Traffic Commissioner’s Office when it was the Institute of the Madras Voluntary Guards, late in the 19th century. The NEW, courtesy G. Srinivasan, is of the multi-storey Police Commissioner’s Office that has replaced it. More on the building (see Lost Landmarks).

The demolition of historic Stowe Hall was done a couple of decades back when awareness had not yet crept in. But a recent discovery of a few photographs of that building, courtesy the TN Police and our own searches, brought back to mind a beautiful structure now forgotten.