Victoria Clock Tower

The Victoria Clock Tower is one of the few surviving colonial-era structures in Jacobabad's town centre, a four-sided tower that rises above the bazar area and remains a landmark of the city. It is a modest structure by the standards of the grand clock towers that the British erected across the subcontinent, but in a city with little other architecture of note, it stands out.

The surrounding bazar is lively and gives a better sense of the city's daily life than the tower itself. Jacobabad's heat — summer temperatures that routinely reach 50°C and have touched 52°C — means that outdoor activity is essentially confined to early morning and after sunset for several months of the year.

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A story
The clock tower was built during the British colonial period and named for Queen Victoria, as was the custom across the subcontinent. General John Jacob, who founded the town in the 1840s and ran it essentially as a personal fiefdom for two decades, was an unusually capable administrator who built canals, roads, and civic buildings that outlasted him by more than a century. He died here in 1858, the same year the East India Company was dissolved, and is buried in the town he created.