The private Mumbai city tour begins at your hotel at 8am with pick-up in a private air-conditioned vehicle. The first stop is Dhobi Ghat — the world’s largest open-air laundry, built in 1890 and still operating today with 7,000 washermen scrubbing Mumbai’s clothes in open stone troughs. It has been battling washing machines for a hundred years and winning. No other city in the world has anything quite like it.

Crawford Market follows — Mumbai’s finest Victorian-era market, a riot of fresh produce, spices, crockery, chocolates, and live animals, designed in part by Rudyard Kipling’s father and still as chaotic and colourful as it was when it opened in 1871.

The next stop is Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus — CST — a UNESCO World Heritage building and the finest example of Victorian Gothic Revival architecture in India. What makes CST extraordinary is not just its grandeur but its ambition: Gothic flying buttresses and pointed arches fused with peacock motifs, lotus domes, and carved Indian deities into a single building that expresses the collision of two civilisations. More than six million people pass through it every day, making it simultaneously one of the most spectacular and most functional buildings in the world.

A short drive brings you to Rajabai Tower in the Mumbai University complex — the Big Ben of Mumbai, a 125-year-old Gothic revival clock tower that has overlooked the city since 1878, when Mumbai was still Bombay and the British Empire was at its peak.

The Gateway of India is the centrepiece of the afternoon — the triumphal arch built in 1911 to welcome King George V and Queen Mary, and through which in 1948 the last British troops marched out of India in the ceremony that ended three centuries of colonial rule. Your guide tells both moments of this story with equal weight.

The Mumbai city tour ends at Siddhivinayak Temple — the most revered Ganesh temple in Mumbai, more than 200 years old, whose idol is carved from a single block of black stone. The contrast between the colonial grandeur of the morning and the living devotion of this temple is itself a portrait of the city.

Hotel drop by 4pm.

This private Mumbai city tour is fully inclusive. We take care of hotel pick-up and drop in a private air-conditioned vehicle, your English-speaking cultural guide throughout the day, all entry fees and a traditional Indian vegetarian lunch.