The Residency

The Residency is the most haunting site in Lucknow — a complex of half-ruined brick buildings set in gardens above the Gomti, kept deliberately in the state they were left at the end of the 1857 siege. Cannonballs are still embedded in the walls. The British occupants and their Indian retainers — about three thousand people — held out for 87 days under increasingly desperate conditions before relief arrived.

A small but excellent museum in the surviving outbuilding tells the story from both sides, with letters, weapons, and personal possessions recovered from the ruins. The cemetery contains the grave of Sir Henry Lawrence, the British commander, who died early in the siege. The grounds are large and shaded — easy to spend two or three hours here.

things to do sight architecture
A story
When the British were finally relieved on 17 November 1857, after nearly five months of siege, almost three thousand of the original defenders and refugees were dead. The Union Jack was kept flying day and night at the Residency ruins from then until Indian independence in 1947, the only place in the British Empire where the flag was never lowered.