There was a time, not long ago, when Lahore presented itself as a fortress-capital, as a bastion of sovereignty. In 1846, when the East India Company captured Lahore, they found it encased within thirty-foot-high masonry walls, surrounded by a deep ditch and dotted with 13 circular gated bastions, each approached by angled entrances designed to resist cavalry charges and command fire from artillery. The city was a formidable fortress, its identity carved from high defensive walls, a deep protective ditch, and a citadel designed for war. Yet, within a single decade under the administration of the East India Company, this martial character was systematically dismantled. Lahore was transformed from a fortified capital of the Sikh Empire into a walled city of the British Raj. This transition reveals a fundamental shift from military sovereignty to bureaucratic governance. This transformation was not accidental. It was a deliberate project of urban pacification, where physical changes to the city’s structure reflected the new priorities of its rulers.
Before annexation, Lahore’s urban form still bore the unmistakable imprint of the Sikh sovereign order. The city wall rose to a height of nearly thirty feet, reinforced with bastions and outworks (such as fausse brayes, which were low outer ramparts built in front of the main wall to provide an additional line of defence and to shield the base of the wall from artillery fire). A surrounding ditch added further depth to this defensive system. Its thirteen gates, many of them constructed with artillery-defensible approaches, marked not only entrances but also points of control and display of power. At the centre, the citadel functioned as a strong fortress with high walls, a concentrated military presence, and the symbolic authority of sovereignty. Circulation within the city was largely inward-looking: roads directed internally within the walls, while the ditches and defensive works inhibited any outward expansion. These features underscored the priorities of a regime whose emphasis lay in defence and in projecting its sovereign power.
By the mid-1850s, under the East India Company, this landscape had altered dramatically. The once-imposing city wall was lowered to about twenty feet, its bastions and outworks demolished. At the same time, the wide defensive ditches surrounding the walled city were systematically levelled. In their place, the colonial authorities laid out gardens that encircled the old city, transforming a military barrier into a civic and ornamental space. This initiative gave rise to what became known as the Circular Garden, a continuous green belt around the walled city, symbolising both the erasure of Sikh-era fortifications and the imposition of new colonial aesthetics.
The British did not dismantle Lahore’s fortifications because they felt secure inside them, but because their military geography had expanded. Lahore was not to be a fortress resisting siege, but a provincial hub in a grid of empire
The gates remained large, but their military character had decayed, serving more as relics than as defensible positions. The Lahore Fort still looked grand and commanding on the skyline, but by the 1850s it had lost its teeth. The British no longer saw it as a fortress to defend. Instead, they kept only a small garrison inside — a few artillerymen, one company of European infantry, and a wing of a native regiment. Their main job was simply to guard the Treasury. Officials even admitted openly that the fort could not really be defended anymore, since ordinary houses in the city stood higher than parts of its walls. What had once been the royal seat of power was now little more than a storehouse. The British focus had shifted elsewhere. Rather than strengthening walls, they invested in roads, drains, and bridges. Around the neat brick wall of the city, the Public Works Department built a wide metalled road. This made it easier to move people and goods, and it also allowed the authorities to keep an eye on the city’s edge. Better bridges over the Ravee and new drainage works showed the new priorities: health, order, and administration instead of military display.
But while the fort and the walls lost their older meaning, the life of the city carried on with full energy. The bazaars were as crowded and lively as ever. Akbari Bazaar bustled with wholesale grain traders; Heera Mandi thrived on its courtesans, musicians, and performers; while Moti and Lohari Bazaars glowed with the colours of silk, cotton, and household goods. In these markets, Lahore’s vibrancy was on full display, even as the city itself was being reshaped under colonial rule. The Badami Bagh, once a royal orchard, had by the 1854 been laid out anew under the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of the Punjab, signalling the Company’s effort to remake leisure and cultivation in a colonial fashion. If the old city was cut down to size, the new Lahore was expanding just beyond its gates. The Anarkali quarter emerged as the nucleus of colonial order. Here stood the Chief Commissioner’s offices, the parade ground, artillery lines, and prisons. European bungalows dotted the area, standing in contrast to the crowded lanes within the walls.
Further afield, the Meean Meer cantonment, established in the early 1852, became the permanent base of British regiments. Here, European troops lived in airy barracks, separated deliberately from the dense population of the native city. Roads linked these new colonial spaces with the walled town, creating a dual geography: the old Lahore of bazaars and shrines, and the new Lahore of cantonments and offices. The census of the 1850s put Lahore’s population at 94,193, of nearly 9829 were in Anarakli area. Of these, 59,215 were Muslims, 35,352 Hindus and Sikhs. The European community was a small minority of Europeans and Eurasians — yet their presence was magnified by their control of administration and the cantonment. Policing, too, reflected the new order. The Kotwali, housed in a central building, commanded 100 burkundazes (armed constables) and 256 chowkidars (watchmen). While the chowkidar system was inherited from earlier times, it was now folded into the Company’s bureaucratic frame.
The cutting down of Lahore’s walls was not simply an engineering project. It was a political statement. By dismantling Sikh defences, the Company signalled that indigenous sovereignty had ended. The walls remained — as picturesque markers of the “native city” — but they no longer guarded power. Power had shifted outside: to Anarkali, to Meean Meer, to the offices and barracks of the colonial state. Lahore’s transition from fortified capital to walled town was, in short, the architectural expression of a new order. What had once been a city that spoke of independence now became a city legible to empire — drained, policed, and reorganised for trade and governance. The two Lahores — one enclosed by walls, the other expanding into cantonments — would together define the city’s future. In the space between them, the story of modern Lahore began to unfold.
The Sikh rulers' formidable walls were an expression of a power that anticipated external threats and was prepared for war. Military strategy under the Company thus relocated security from within the city walls to external cantonments. The first site of this transition was Anarkali, the old Sikh chaonee, which under Ranjit Singh had been filled with horse artillery, field batteries, and European officers like Ventura and Allard. Under the British, its barracks were dismantled or converted into civil offices, its bazaar transformed into a regulated market, and its tombs and monuments redefined as churches or museums. Anarkali ceased to be a defensive camp and became the embryo of the colonial civil station.
The real pivot came with the establishment of the Meean Meer Cantonment, a few miles outside Lahore. It was conceived as part of a wider regional strategy. It was the headquarters of a division stretching between the Sutlej and the Beas, hosting artillery, cavalry, and infantry in planned, spacious lines. From here, the British could project military power across Punjab, maintain order in Lahore without being trapped by its narrow streets, and integrate the city into a network of cantonments that stretched from Ambala to Peshawar. The British did not dismantle Lahore’s fortifications because they felt secure inside them, but because their military geography had expanded. Lahore was not to be a fortress resisting siege, but a provincial hub in a grid of empire. Its walls remained only to enclose and regulate, while true defence was externalised to the open spaces of cantonments and the broader network of colonial military strategy.
The cataclysmic events of the 1857 Mutiny vindicated the Company’s policy of urban pacification and triggered its most aggressive phase. The rebellion demonstrated the extreme danger posed by fortified Indian cities, with Delhi becoming a rebel stronghold that took months of brutal fighting to recapture. In the bloody aftermath, the British authorities systematically destroyed parts of city walls across numerous centres to prevent their future use in rebellion. Lahore was no exception. Historical records report that the southern walls of the city and the southern walls of the Lahore Fort were demolished around 1857. This was a strategic act, explicitly intended to prevent Lahore from ever being capable of resisting British authority in the manner Delhi had. This final demolition was the ultimate symbol of the city’s transition from a fortress to a pacified space. The journey of Lahore from a fortified city to a walled city under the East India Company was far more than an architectural change. It was a transformation of sovereignty itself.