Yangon Downtown — Colonial Grid Aerial
699.00 د.إ
Yangon’s downtown colonial grid photographed from above — the British colonial commercial buildings of the 1900s and 1920s in their intact urban block configuration, the city’s most concentrated example of colonial commercial architecture in Southeast Asia.
Description
Yangon’s downtown district retains the largest concentration of British colonial commercial architecture in Southeast Asia — the grid of 1900s and 1920s office buildings, department stores, and commercial premises that constituted the commercial centre of the colonial capital of Burma. The aerial photograph of the downtown grid reveals the urban block configuration that gives the neighbourhood its distinctive character: the continuous street facades of 5-8 storey brick buildings in various states of maintenance from well-restored to dramatically decayed, the city’s current economic activity visible in the street markets operating between and beneath the colonial facades. This image was made from a helicopter at 250 metres altitude during a heritage conservation aerial survey, looking northward along Merchant Street: the grid of colonial buildings is fully visible in both the east-west and north-south directions, the Irrawaddy River visible at the image’s northern edge.
