Bath-born architect who joined the Indian Public Works Department at twenty and spent the rest of his life in Bombay, where he died in 1900. Stevens gave the city the face it still has: Victoria Terminus, the Municipal Corporation Building across the road from it, Churchgate Station and the Oriental Life Assurance Building. His method was to take the polychrome structural Gothic of Ruskin and Scott and let Indian craftsmen carve it — foliage, animals, peacocks and monkeys drawn from local ornament — over an iron-and-stone frame. The results are neither English nor Indian but the specific hybrid the Raj built with, and Bombay is where that hybrid was most confidently made. He is defined in this slice because his entire practice was based in the city his buildings shaped.
