Hotel Clarkes in Shimla, a property of Oberoi Hotels, has been shut down indefinitely after engineers declared the building unsafe. The heritage hotel boundary wall had started caving in last week and the management had to evacuate all the guests on Sunday night.
The hotel was constructed in 1898 and was one of the first acquisitions of M S Oberoi, the founder of the Oberoi chain of hotels. "We had to evacuate all guests and staff members on Sunday night," D P Bhatia, general manager of Clarkes said in a report by TOI. The guests occupying the hotel's 18 rooms were shifted to another hotel. Very near to the heritage hotel is the high court building and excavation work for constructing a lawyer's chamber there endangered the Clarkes. To make way for the new construction, not only were about a dozen trees felled but even the motorable road connecting the court to the highway broke after the retaining wall caved in May following the excavation work. With the onset of monsoon, the hotel's gardens, adjacent to the broken road, gave way a month ago. To save the hotel, a retaining wall was reconstructed in a hurry, but it collapsed earlier this week, exposing the plush property to being pulled down should it slide further. A report by IIT Roorkee, which was engaged by the Shimla municipal corporation to study the effects of the construction, has concluded that the high court chamber is coming up in defiance of topographic constraints and has endangered the heritage hotel. The report states that the construction should be stopped to save the heritage building. Shimla municipal commissioner M P Sood said, "The IIT Roorkee report was only received on Monday and has been forwarded to the government for appropriate action." He said the land on which the multi-storey building is to come up belonged to the Municipal Corporation but had been leased out to the high court. Given the sensitive zone where excavation was carried out for laying the foundation of the chambers, the civic body had sought expert opinion from the institute.
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