It looms silently over Kolkata’s S.S. Hogg Market, a red-brick sentinel whose hands have stood still for years. The iconic clock tower, a landmark for over a century, was built to not only mark time, but to shape the very rhythm of life around Lindsay Street. Installed in the early 20th century, as part of the market’s eastern expansion, the clock was manufactured by Gillett and Johnston of Croydon, England, one of the most respected horological firms of its time.
The four-faced clock is both a feat of engineering and an architectural statement. Its turret, in Victorian Gothic-style with sharply peaked spires, was designed not just to crown the marketplace, but to signal civic progress. Inside, a set of mechanical gears once drove the hour and minute hands in synchrony, visible to shoppers and stallholders from all four directions. Each quarter-hour, it struck — a chime that once echoed above the sound of hooves, then rickshaws, then engines. A sound that has gone missing for the past decades.
A picture from 1900s
Since 2018, the clock no longer works. Years of rainwater seepage, accelerated by storms and a lack of maintenance access, caused the internal wooden stairwell to rot and collapse, cutting off any route to the clock mechanism. Without access, maintenance was impossible. The timekeeper became a frozen monument, its hands stuck as if pausing the city in mid-sentence.
Swapan Dutta, one of the few heritage clock specialists in the city and part of a family of clock repairers spanning five generations, knows the mechanism intimately. “The structure is broken and it has been shut for years,” he says. “It stopped in 2018. Before that, we used to maintain it, but now we can’t even reach the clock chamber,” said Dutta, whose family had been given the responsibility of maintaining the clock by the KMC in the 1970s.
An image from 1920
The uniqueness of the S.S. Hogg Market clock lies in its weight-driven mechanism, typical of early 20th-century tower clocks. It has four synchronised faces — each linked by rods and gears — requiring precise alignment. “You can’t just replace it with an electronic clock,” Swapan explains. “This is a mechanical clock. It has to be wound, it has to breathe. Once it starts again, it can keep going for another 100 years — if we take care of it.”
An image from 1965
It is also one of only three such clocks in India. The others are located at the Madras Town Hall in Chennai and the Bombay Harbour in Mumbai — making the New Market tower not just a Kolkata landmark, but part of a rare national legacy of mechanical civic clocks.
An image from 1968
Leading the effort to bring it back is Mudar Patherya, founder of the Kolkata Restorers, a civic initiative that has taken charge of the restoration. “I want to get to that clock. That is my aim and that is the reason why we started this project,” says Patherya. “We are being supported by Techno Electric and Engineering, who are equally interested in the project without wanting any kind of branding,” he adds, emphasising that this is heritage work, not a branding opportunity. “I hope Techno’s initiative and outlook inspire other brands to step forward and restore Kolkata’s lost glory.”