page_title: Landour
section_title: Architecture
hierarchical_section_title: Landour / Architecture
caption_attribution_description: Char Dhukan
context_page_description: Landour, a small cantonment town contiguous with Mussoorie, is about 35 km from the city of Dehradun in the northern state of Uttarakhand in India. The twin towns of Mussoorie and Landour, together, are a well-known British Raj-era hill station in northern India. Mussoorie-Landour was widely known as the "Queen of the Hills". The name Landour is drawn from Llanddowror, a village in Carmarthenshire in southwest Wales. During the Raj, it was common to give nostalgic English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish names to one's home, reflecting one's ethnicity. Names drawn from literary works were also common, as from those by Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson and many others.
context_section_description: Architecturally speaking, Landour is akin to other Raj-era hill stations of Northern India. Since Mussoorie-Landour never rivalled Shimla in administrative, political or military terms, there are few 'grand official buildings' to speak of. The private homes are largely the common Raj-era pastiches, with pitched roofs (often painted a dull red) and large verandahs, important given the heavy monsoons. Most houses contain architectural echoes both of Home Counties England and of the resort towns of the Scottish Highlands. Many have well-kept gardens.
  About the only "architecturally significant" building was The Castle on the aptly named Castle Hill, now part of Survey of India, where the deposed boy-king Duleep Singh of Punjab, the son of the iconic Maharaja Ranjit Singh, was often "kept" for convalescent purposes between 1849 and 1853. (Sadly, The Castle was heavily modified in an ad hoc manner over the decades, rendering it unrecognizable as compared to early photographs). The Amir of Afghanistan too was in the town in quasi-exile at various times in the early 20th century as Raj officials engaged in their customary machinations of map-drawing and re-drawing across the Subcontinent.
  A prominent local landmark was the Clock Tower at the start of Landour Bazaar. It was of little architectural merit, but informally marked the boundary between Landour and Mussoorie (others say it is the former Picture Palace movie theater a bit lower down).  Demolished in 2011, the tower is expected to be rebuilt sometime in the future, having been delayed by local political wrangling.
  Landour has four Raj-era churches, two of them distinctly Indo-Gothic in style. Of the four, two remain very much in use: Kellogg Church (built 1903, once American Presbyterian, now non-denominational, and also home to the Landour Language School) and the St. Paul's Church (built 1840, once Anglican, now non-denominational) in Char Dukan, where Jim Corbett's parents, Christopher and Mary Corbett, married on 13 October 1859. A third Methodist church in Landour Bazaar fell into disuse after the Raj ended and was eventually seized by squatters for commercial purposes by way of 'kabza'. The fourth church is the once-Anglican St. Peter's Church, latterly Catholic, and now is disuse and occupied by squatters apparently with the 'permission' of the church committee; it is atop Landour hill.
caption: Char Dukan literally Four Shops, Landour
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