Mussoorie Library

Gandhi Chowk is called the Library end of town for a reason: the whole square turns around this Victorian-Gothic building, its cast-iron lacework balcony leaning out over the road. The subscription library behind that facade opened in 1843, which makes it one of the oldest hill-station libraries in India, and it still lends books to its members. Non-members get no further than the foyer, so come for the stonework, the balcony and the square itself: a corner of 1840s Mussoorie that survived more or less intact.

A working members' library since 1843, the oldest institution in Mussoorie