Polo View is one of Srinagar's main shopping streets for handicrafts, sitting between Lal Chowk and the Boulevard Road tourist area. The street takes its name from the polo ground that occupied this part of the city before it was developed. The shops here sell the full range of Kashmiri handicrafts — pashmina shawls, carpets, papier-mâché, woodwork — in the tourist-market format: fixed-price signs in windows, air conditioning, aggressive touts outside. The standards vary considerably from shop to shop.
The street is most useful for comparison shopping — once you've established quality and price at the government emporium, walking Polo View gives a sense of the range available and the latitude for negotiation at smaller private shops. The pashmina trade on Polo View is the most contentious area: the proportion of genuinely hand-spun, 100% cashmere pieces among the "pashmina" offered is low, and distinguishing them without testing equipment is difficult. The safest rule is to pay for what you can verify (a weave count you can see, a carpet knot count you can check) rather than trusting provenance claims for soft goods.