Kharadar is one of Karachi's oldest residential and commercial neighbourhoods, concentrated in the area just north of the port that was the original settlement of the city before British expansion transformed it. The name means 'salt gate' in Sindhi, referring to a gate in the fortifications that once surrounded the old town. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was born here in 1876, and his birth house — Wazir Mansion — still stands on Newnham Road as a museum.
The neighbourhood retains the density and character of a place that has been continuously inhabited and traded in for two centuries. The streets are narrow and intensely used, with workshops, wholesale traders, and food vendors occupying every available space. The architecture is a mixture of colonial-era merchant houses with overhanging balconies, later infill, and the inevitable overlay of painted signs and cables. Walking through Kharadar gives a more immediate sense of how most Karachiites have historically lived than the wider streets and planned layouts of the colonial civic centre nearby.