Durgapur
— — a planned city built around a steel mill.
Not only on a wall.
“Durgapur was drawn on paper in the 1950s and built in the early sixties around the Durgapur Steel Plant, one of the first integrated steel mills of post-independence India. The American architect Joseph Allen Stein and his colleague Benjamin Polk laid out the township in tree-lined sectors. The Damodar River runs along the south. About half a million people live here now. The plant still runs around the clock, lit from a long way off.
Durgapur, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Durgapur sits on the north bank of the Damodar River in Paschim Bardhaman district of West Bengal, about 180 kilometres northwest of Kolkata. The 2011 census recorded a population of around 566,000, with the wider urban agglomeration crossing 580,000. The city grew around the Durgapur Steel Plant, commissioned in 1959 as part of India's Second Five-Year Plan with British technical collaboration. The Grand Trunk Road — National Highway 19 — runs through the city, and Durgapur railway station is a major stop on the Howrah-Delhi main line.
Joseph Allen Stein and Benjamin Polk, two American architects working in India through the 1950s and 60s, drew the master plan for Durgapur township as a grid of numbered sectors with shaded avenues, schools, and a central market. Stein later designed the India International Centre in Delhi; Polk built churches across Bengal. Their Durgapur is a rare surviving example of postwar Indian modernist urbanism — a planned company town for a state-owned steel mill, conceived in the same idiom as Chandigarh but at a smaller scale and without Le Corbusier's monumental gestures.
Durgapur is a working industrial city rather than a tourist stop. Most visitors come for business with the steel plant, the Alloy Steels Plant, or one of the engineering colleges that grew up around them. The Howrah-Delhi Rajdhani and other long-distance trains stop at Durgapur station. Kazi Nazrul Islam Airport at Andal, 15 kilometres east, offers limited flights. The Garh Jungle and the Kalyaneshwari Temple lie within a short drive, and the Damodar barrage upstream is a common evening walk for residents.