Charles Metcalfe was acting Governor-General for a year in 1835 and used it to abolish the restrictions on the press, which made him popular with the Calcutta public and unpopular with the Company. The hall was raised by public subscription in his honour.
Robinson gave it thirty Corinthian columns, twelve metres high, taken from the Temple of the Winds in Athens and the Tower of the Winds. The result is severe, Greek and completely unlike the stuccoed Palladian city around it.
It housed the Calcutta Public Library, which merged into the Imperial Library in 1903 and became the National Library after independence. The building then held the Agri-Horticultural Society and a good deal of neglect.
The Archaeological Survey restored it in the 2010s and it now holds an exhibition on the city, though its opening hours are unreliable.
What the guidebook leaves out
The building faces the river, not the road, because it was designed to be arrived at by boat.
