On Manhole Covers

Manhole covers are a seemingly mundane piece of city infrastructure that give grimy plumbing and sewerage a curious personality. Since municipalities don’t go around replacing them wholesale when roads are redeveloped etc, they can reveal bits of history in charming ways.

For example, you can step through Bandra’s relation to its municipality through manhole covers. In the gullies of older villages, you see older anonymous covers dating to 1932. Then you see along the earlier but larger streets, the Bandra Municipality branded covers. As the sewer network widened, we see covers from the BMC, MCGB and finally MCGM. At some point, the covers transition to concrete and then some kind of thermoplastic composite material.

Of Bombay’s covers, my favourite are the MTNL covers.

Some welder had fun with this one, in Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania

They also make great for great postcards: I made prints of drain hardware in Shanghai, and sent them off.