16 heritage buildings restored in Lahore

LAHORE: Conservation of over a dozen high architectural value buildings will add more colour to the heritage of walled city of Lahore, which besides increasing tourism will also reflect a soft image of the country internationally.

Sixteen buildings which were on top of the Walled City of Lahore Authority’s high architectural value buildings list were selected for conservation and restoration for which the Punjab government provided a fund of Rs20 million. These buildings, including two havelies, are private properties and are returned to the owners after completion of project.

The buildings were in a shambles and dilapidated when WCLA started conservation work, said Tanya Qureshi, Deputy Director Communication WCLA while talking with The News. She said Haveli Dina Nath is the prominent building among the restored structures.

After selection of buildings, 16 selected dangerous buildings were divided into four packages so that rehabilitation work may be completed within prescribed time (financial year 2015-16), officials said, adding the selected buildings were D-46, D-47, D-72, D-85, D-149, D-546, G-180, G-188, H-1074, H-19, H-367, I-803, F-2112, F-1285, C-782 and I-1143.

Director Conservation WCLA Najam-us-Saqib said the major problem was the social clearance of the properties, which means that as a first step the authority’s teams had to convince the residents about the scope of work of the project.

“It takes us a lot of time to remove all misconceptions and reservations of the local residents,” he added.

Most of the residents living in dangerous buildings were found poor having no replacement of living. As the project was to rehabilitate these dangerous buildings and presence of residents was a risk to life. Therefore, conservation wing, WCLA team tried its best to evacuate buildings before execution but some of properties were not evacuated caused risk and made working more careful consequently resulted in more consumption of time.

Azeem Dad Khan, Senior Architect WCLA, said most of the streets within walled city of Lahore were narrow enough that crossing of two pedestrians was difficult. Construction at this kind of site is a challenge in itself.

“The narrow excess caused many problems in material handling and transportation of material,” he said, adding as a result, during the project, donkey labour was used.

He said that during dismantling of damaged roofing structures it was found that clay used above wooden structure was in large quantity and it contains flaky particles which may damage the polythene sheet used to water tight the roofing structure. Hence, it was decided that this kind of clay should be replaced with the sweat earth. Director General WCLA Kamran Lashari said preservation of our heritage is our top priority. “The people living inside these buildings were at risk and to avoid any unpleasant situations we conserved these first,” he said, adding more buildings would be taken up in this fiscal year.