Kanpur
— — a working river city the British called the Manchester of the East.
Not only on a wall.
“A city of about three million people sitting on the right bank of the Ganges, eighty kilometres downstream from Lucknow. Kanpur ran the leather and cotton mills that earned it the Manchester of the East a century ago, and the brick chimneys still stand over the trans-Ganga industrial belt. Upstream at Bithoor the river bends past the ghats where, by tradition, Valmiki composed the Ramayana. The JK Temple, the Phool Bagh maidan, the Greenpark cricket ground and the long ribbon of the Ganga Barrage hold the city together while the river does what it has always done. from the studio
Kanpur, 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.
Kanpur lies on the south bank of the Ganges in central Uttar Pradesh, about 80 kilometres southwest of the state capital Lucknow and 480 kilometres southeast of Delhi. The municipal area holds roughly 3.1 million people, ranking it among India's twelve largest cities, and the urban district covers about 403 square kilometres at an elevation near 126 metres. The Lucknow-Kanpur expressway, National Highway 19 and the main Delhi-Howrah railway all pass through the city; Chakeri Airport runs daily flights to Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru.
Kanpur grew up as a British cantonment after the Treaty of Faizabad in 1801 and became one of India's earliest industrial centres. The Cawnpore Woollen Mills opened in 1876 and the Empress Mills in cotton followed; by 1900 the city's leather tanneries supplied the British Army across Asia, and the press named Kanpur the Manchester of the East. The 1857 siege at Wheeler's Entrenchment and the Bibighar memorial are part of the same nineteenth-century layer. Heavy industry contracted after 1980, but small-scale leatherwork still drives a significant share of city employment.
Most visits work the river and the colonial-era civil lines. The JK Temple at Sarvodaya Nagar, completed in 1953 in a modernised Nagara style, is one of the city's signature buildings; Moti Jheel and Phool Bagh hold the old maidans where Independence-era meetings drew tens of thousands. Greenpark Stadium has hosted Test cricket since 1952. Twenty-two kilometres upstream, Bithoor's ghats and the Brahmavart temple sit where Valmiki tradition places the writing of the Ramayana. The cleanest months are November through February.