Ispahani Centre, Nungambakkam – One of Chennai’s Early Shopping Malls

Long before Chennai had enormous malls with multiplexes, food courts and hundreds of shops, there were only a handful of places where the city was beginning to experience mall culture.

Ispahani Centre on Nungambakkam High Road was one of them.

Located in one of Chennai's busiest commercial neighbourhoods, Ispahani Centre emerged in the 1990s as one of the city's early organised shopping centres. For people familiar only with today's Express Avenue, Phoenix Marketcity or VR Chennai, calling Ispahani a mall may now seem slightly surprising.

It is much smaller.

And that is part of its story.

Shopping and Offices Under One Roof

Ispahani Centre was never conceived entirely as a huge shopping destination.

Retail occupies the lower portion of the building, while much of the upper space is used for commercial offices. This mix of shops and offices distinguishes it from the large self-contained malls that appeared in Chennai later.

Over the years, the retail area has housed fashion stores, jewellery outlets, salons, cafés and restaurants. The names have naturally changed with time.

The scale, however, has remained intimate.

You do not need hours to walk through Ispahani Centre. There is no multiplex to search for, no enormous food court and no maze of floors. In fact, compared with Chennai's newer malls, it can feel almost unusually quiet.

A Reminder of an Earlier Chennai

Location has always been one of Ispahani Centre's strengths.

It stands directly on Nungambakkam High Road, close to offices, educational institutions, hotels and restaurants. Even after much larger shopping centres appeared across Chennai, the building continued to function as a familiar landmark in Nungambakkam.

When I originally wrote about Ispahani Centre, I looked at it simply as a small mall that could no longer compete with the newer ones.

Looking at it now, I think it is interesting for another reason.

Places such as Spencer Plaza and Ispahani Centre belong to an earlier phase in Chennai's shopping culture. They remind us of a time when simply having several branded stores, cafés and offices together in one complex was still something relatively new to the city.

Ispahani Centre may no longer be the kind of mall one travels across Chennai merely to visit.

But as one of the city's early shopping complexes, it has quietly become part of Nungambakkam's urban history.

Happy travelling.