You probably didn't know this existed

• Hidden #001Old cemeteries

  There is a grave in this city sixty years older than the city.

  Rezabeebeh's stone is dated 1630, six decades before Job Charnock tied up at Sutanuti. It is the strongest physical argument that a settled trading community was already here.

  The 1630 gravestone · Armenian Church of the Holy Nazareth, Armenian Street

• Hidden #002Heritage doors & details

  Thousands of people walk over the outline of the Black Hole every day.

  Brass strips set into the pavement on the north-east side mark the surveyed outline of the guardroom. There is no sign explaining them.

  The brass lines outside the GPO · General Post Office, BBD Bagh

• Hidden #003Hidden temples

  A Kali temple where the prasad is noodles.

  Run by the Hakka Chinese community of Tangra, with Chinese paper offerings burned alongside Bengali ritual. Chow mein and chop suey are offered at the shrine.

  The Chinese Kali Temple · Matheswartala Road, Tangra

• Hidden #004Old bakeries

  The last Jewish bakery in a city that once had thousands of Jews.

  Founded 1902 by Nahoum Israel Mordecai. The teak counters and glass cases are original. The Christmas plum cake queue is real and starts in November.

  Nahoum & Sons · F-20 New Market

• Hidden #005Forgotten buildings

  Fewer than twenty Jews remain, and the buildings are immaculate.

  Beth El, Magen David and Neveh Shalome are maintained by Muslim caretakers, several from families who have held the job for generations. They hold the keys.

  Three synagogues, Muslim caretakers · Pollock Street and Canning Street, Burrabazar

• Hidden #006Hidden courtyards

  A Durga Puja that has not missed a year since the year of Plassey.

  Raja Nabakrishna Deb's pillared courtyard shrine, unrebuilt since the eighteenth century, and still used for the household Puja every autumn.

  The 1757 thakur dalan · Sovabazar Rajbari

• Hidden #007Old signs

  Hand-painted theatre posters, on the same walls, for a century.

  The jatra companies cast in early autumn and dispatch troupes across rural Bengal for the winter season. The posters go up on walls the trade has used since the 1920s.

  The jatra poster walls · Beadon Street, off Rabindra Sarani

• Hidden #008Old signs

  Shopfronts still hand-lettered on tin, to order, in three scripts.

  A handful of workshops still cut and letter enamel boards in Bengali, Hindi and English. Vinyl printing has taken most of the trade and they know it.

  The sign painters · Rabindra Sarani, north of Nakhoda Masjid

• Hidden #009Forgotten buildings

  Thirty Corinthian columns, pointed at the river rather than the road.

  Built in 1844 for a public library and designed to be arrived at by boat, which is why the grand front addresses the water and the road gets the side.

  Metcalfe Hall faces the wrong way · Strand Road at Hare Street

• Hidden #010Hidden temples

  The most extravagant interior in Kolkata, and almost no visitors.

  Built in 1867 by the jeweller Rai Badridas Bahadur. Mirror mosaic, Belgian coloured glass, Venetian chandeliers, and a lamp said to have burned continuously since it opened.

  Pareshnath Jain Temple · Badridas Temple Street, Maniktala

• Hidden #011Unusual streets

  An entire school of modern Indian art started in these alleys, selling to pilgrims.

  From the 1830s, painters here produced fast, flat, brush-drawn watercolours for pilgrims, which turned satirical and mocked the westernised babu. Jamini Roy built a career on it.

  Where Kalighat pat was painted · The lanes east of Kalighat temple

• Hidden #012Old markets

  A Chinese breakfast market that exists for ninety minutes a day.

  Pork buns, fish ball soup, momos and sausages sold from baskets on the pavement by the last families of the old Chinatown. Finished by half past seven.

  Territi Bazar, 6am · Off Bowbazar, central Kolkata

• Hidden #013Unusual streets

  Named for a trade that moved out two centuries ago and never got renamed.

  The Chinese traders left for Tiretta Bazar and then Tangra. The street kept the name and became wholesale hardware and paper.

  Old China Bazar Street · Burrabazar

• Hidden #014Forgotten theatres

  Built in 1883 on an actress's earnings, and named after somebody else.

  Binodini Dasi funded the theatre and was promised it would carry her name. It did not. She left the stage at twenty-three.

  The Star Theatre facade · Bidhan Sarani, Hatibagan

• Hidden #015Forgotten theatres

  1893, nearly lost, and now staging again.

  One of the great houses of the Bengali commercial stage, closed and derelict for years, restored by the state and given to the Minerva Repertory.

  Minerva Theatre · Beadon Street

• Hidden #016Old mansions

  A private zoo, in a north Kolkata house, since the 1850s.

  Peacocks in the garden and an aviary that has been kept by the same family for six generations, alongside 126 kinds of marble and two canvases attributed to Rubens.

  The Marble Palace menagerie · Muktaram Babu Street, Chorbagan

• Hidden #017Old mansions

  The widow who built Dakshineswar lived here, and blockaded the river once.

  Rani Rashmoni ran a business empire, fought the Company in court, and once paid the fishing tax on the whole Hooghly and blocked shipping with her boats until the tax was withdrawn.

  Rani Rashmoni's house · Janbazar

• Hidden #018Old cemeteries

  The poet wrote his own epitaph, and it asks you to stop.

  Madhusudan Dutt invented Bengali blank verse and the Bengali sonnet, died at forty-nine three days after his wife, and is buried under words he chose himself.

  Michael Madhusudan's grave · Lower Circular Road Cemetery

• Hidden #019Old cemeteries

  Ninety percent of the people buried in the Scottish cemetery are Indian.

  Opened 1820 for the Presbyterian community, and its later burials are overwhelmingly Bengali converts and their families. Restored by a Scottish–Indian project from 2008.

  The Scottish Cemetery · Karaya Road

• Hidden #020Forgotten buildings

  There was a Greek community here, and this is what is left of it.

  The Church of the Transfiguration, moved from Amratala Street in the 1920s. Greek merchants traded in Bengal from the eighteenth century; the congregation is now tiny.

  The Greek Orthodox Church · Kalighat, near Rashbehari Avenue

• Hidden #021Forgotten buildings

  Called the chicken market church, and older than most of the city.

  The Cathedral of the Most Holy Rosary, built 1799 on an earlier chapel site, serving a Portuguese and Luso-Indian community that predates the Company's factory.

  The Portuguese Church at Murgihata · Brabourne Road

• Hidden #022Unusual streets

  Red-brick blocks built for First World War troops, and an Anglo-Indian Christmas that outclasses Park Street.

  Built around 1918 as barracks and never used as such. The Anglo-Indian community has lived here since, and makes its own wine for Christmas.

  Bow Barracks · Bow Street, central Kolkata

• Hidden #023Old printing presses

  The whole trade is on one street, from typesetting to resale.

  Publishers, printers, paper wholesalers and hand binderies occupy the buildings behind the book stalls. Some still sew signatures by hand.

  The binderies behind the stalls · The lanes off College Street

• Hidden #024Old printing presses

  Bengali type, set by hand, in cases nobody makes any more.

  A handful of jobbing printers still keep Bengali metal type for wedding cards and invitations. The founts cannot be replaced when a sort wears out.

  The last letterpress shops · Around Bowbazar and College Street

• Hidden #025Old bakeries

  Since 1868, and finished by ten in the morning.

  Kochuri, radhaballavi and cholar dal, made and sold in a few hours. Generations of Presidency students have been late to lectures because of the queue.

  Putiram's morning · Surya Sen Street, College Street

• Hidden #026Old bakeries

  A sherbet shop opened in 1918 that was a meeting point for revolutionaries.

  The daab sherbet recipe is said to have come from the scientist Prafulla Chandra Ray. Netaji drank here. The counter has not been changed.

  Paramount's marble counter · Bankim Chatterjee Street

• Hidden #027Unusual streets

  The best light on the river, and almost nobody there.

  A working ghat with swimmers, wrestlers at the akhara nearby, and a boat crossing. It is a fraction as busy as Mullick Ghat and photographs better.

  Ahiritola Ghat at dawn · North Kolkata riverfront

• Hidden #028Hidden courtyards

  Mud-pit wrestling gyms, on the riverbank, at five in the morning.

  Kushti akharas have operated along these ghats for well over a century, mostly run by families originally from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The pits are earth, not mat.

  The riverside akharas · Along the north Kolkata ghats

• Hidden #029Heritage doors & details

  Teak, brass, and a hundred and fifty years of nobody replacing them.

  Louvred shutters, brass knockers shaped as hands and lions, fanlights with coloured glass, and doorframes carved to a pattern the lane's carpenter used on every house.

  The doors of north Kolkata · The lanes of Jorasanko, Sovabazar and Bagbazar

• Hidden #030Heritage doors & details

  A raised front stoop that functioned as the neighbourhood's parliament.

  The rowak is a low platform at the front of a north Kolkata house. Generations of adda happened on them. Municipal rules and street widening have removed most.

  The rowak · Every old house in the north

• Hidden #031Old mansions

  A bonedi bari Puja running since 1770, in a house most people walk past.

  The Deb family house. The Durga here is worshipped in the Harigouri form, and the rituals differ from the standard in ways the family will explain if you ask.

  Chhatu Babu Latu Babur Bari · Beadon Street

• Hidden #032Old mansions

  There is a Tagore promenade in Hungary, and this room explains why.

  Tagore was treated at the Balatonfüred sanatorium in 1926 and planted a tree there. The gallery on his Hungarian, Japanese and Chinese connections is almost always empty.

  The Hungarian gallery at Jorasanko · Jorasanko Thakurbari

• Hidden #033Forgotten buildings

  Viceroys nobody wanted on a plinth, kept indoors.

  Statuary removed from public sites after independence was gathered here rather than destroyed, alongside the hall where J. C. Bose demonstrated radio in 1895.

  The statues in the Town Hall · Esplanade Row West

• Hidden #034Unusual streets

  24 February 1873, horse-drawn, and it failed within nine months.

  The first line ran three and a half kilometres to Armenian Ghat. A second attempt in 1880 stuck, and electrification in 1902 made it the first electric tramway in Asia.

  Where the first tram started · Sealdah to Armenian Ghat

• Hidden #035Forgotten buildings

  A bronze-clad cupola on the Maidan that almost nobody looks at.

  Built in 1847 for the British dead of the 1843 Gwalior campaign, and cast partly from captured guns. Locals call it the Pepper Pot.

  The Gwalior Monument · Near Prinsep Ghat, the Maidan

• Hidden #036Old markets

  A market that grew out of what came off the ships, and still does.

  Imported clothing, electronics, cosmetics and food arriving by routes nobody explains. It predates the customs regime it operates around.

  Fancy Market · Kidderpore

• Hidden #037Forgotten buildings

  An exiled king built a small copy of his capital here, and the biryani is what survived.

  Wajid Ali Shah was moved to Metiabruz in 1856 with his court, musicians and kite-flyers. The Shahi Imambara and a distinctive Urdu culture remain.

  The second Lucknow · Metiabruz, south-west Kolkata

• Hidden #038Old bakeries

  A first-floor Chinese restaurant run by the same family since 1927.

  The Huang family, four generations in. Josephine noodles are named after a family member. There is no signage worth the name.

  Eau Chew · Ganesh Chandra Avenue

• Hidden #039Hidden temples

  A Nichiren Buddhist temple on a Kolkata lake, with drums at dawn.

  Founded in 1935 by the Nipponzan-Myohoji order. Almost always empty, and the quietest place in south Kolkata.

  The Japanese temple at the lake · Rabindra Sarobar, southern bank

• Hidden #040Hidden courtyards

  The people who decide whether the goddess will stand are not the ones whose names are on the studio.

  Bamboo and rice straw, bound with jute rope, months before any clay goes on. It is the least photographed and most structural stage of the whole thing.

  The armature makers · Kumartuli, north Kolkata

40 of 40 · numbers are permanent, the list is not finished