Then and Now: Why it’s called Shell Colony
Every Chembur local knows Shell Colony by name. Fewer pause to ask why the Shell is there.
The short answer sits in the oil business that remade Trombay after Independence. In the early 1950s, Burmah Shell acquired land east of the Kurla-Chembur railway line and built company housing for the staff flooding into its new industrial belt. The result, according to a March 2026 then-and-now essay in Goan Observer by Rajan Narayan, was Shell Colony: a complex of about 300 to 350 two-storeyed homes for company employees.
That housing followed the refinery. Burmah-Shell Refineries Limited was incorporated on 3 November 1952, and the Mumbai Refinery it raised on roughly 454 acres at Mahul was commissioned in 1955. BPCL’s own history pages record that then Vice President Dr S. Radhakrishnan formally declared the plant open in May 1955, with Morarji Desai, then Chief Minister of Bombay State, present. The same industrial surge that filled Shell Colony also brought Stanvac’s refinery, the Trombay atomic-energy complex and, later, Rashtriya Chemicals and Fertilizers – plants that pulled workers from across India into Chembur.
Chembur’s older nickname was “garden suburb”, or “garden city”. In the 1950s and 1960s, buildings were largely held to two storeys – partly because of the Atomic Energy campus nearby, partly because the suburb sat under aircraft approaches to Santa Cruz and Sahar. Height limits loosened from the 1980s, and today’s Chembur skyline of eight-, twenty- and taller storeys is the direct opposite of that low-rise plan. Goan Observer notes that Shell Colony houses, once reserved for employees, began opening to outside buyers through the 1970s and 1980s. In January 1976 the Government of India took over Burmah Shell’s Indian refining and marketing interests; the business became Bharat Refineries Limited and, later, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited. The company name changed. The colony’s name stuck.
Shell Colony today sits inside a Chembur that has turned from an industrial workers’ settlement into one of the eastern suburbs’ most sought-after addresses, yet its name still carries a mid-century oil company’s stamp.
If you have old photographs of Shell Colony or of Chembur’s low-rise years – bungalows, two-storey company rows, Diamond Garden before the towers – share them with MyChembur. Reader albums are how this place keeps its memory when the skyline keeps rewriting itself.