The Taj Mahal Palace

Jamsetji Tata put up this Indo-Saracenic hotel in 1903, two decades before the Gateway of India that now stands across the road from it, and gave the city its first electric lights and lifts. The red dome is so bound up with Mumbai that the building's image was trademarked, a first for Indian architecture. Non-guests can take in the facade from Apollo Bunder or come for tea at the Sea Lounge; the memorial in the lobby honours those killed in the 2008 attacks. Either way, it deserves an unhurried look.

Indian ambition in stone: the hotel that arrived twenty years before the Gateway