Bishop Canning Law College will open at the 237-year-old hostel building of St Thomas’ School in Kidderpore, Kolkata, after the Bar Council of India approved the institution’s five-year BA LLB programme. The college is scheduled to be inaugurated on November 5 at the school’s Diamond Harbour Road campus.
The approval was announced by Bishop Paritosh Canning at St Paul’s Cathedral on Monday. The law college is being established by the Kolkata Diocese of the Church of North India, which decided in 2021 to create the institute. It will be named Bishop Canning Law College.
The move will give a new institutional use to one of the oldest surviving educational buildings associated with the city’s school history. St Thomas’ School, founded in 1789 for community children, is regarded as Kolkata’s oldest functioning school. Its Kidderpore campus historically served both British day scholars and students who came from outside Kolkata and required residential accommodation.
The hostel building had housed generations of students, including many from Anglo-Indian and underprivileged backgrounds. Its conversion means the residential function will end at the building, with existing boarders shifted to other hostels to make space for the law college. The supplied report does not specify the architectural changes planned, the size of the proposed college, or whether the heritage structure will undergo restoration, modification or formal conservation review.
The decision places a long-standing educational building within a wider pattern of institutional reuse, in which older urban properties are adapted to meet new public and educational requirements rather than being left unused. In this case, the building’s past as a hostel and its future as a professional college remain linked to education, although the shift changes how the premises will serve students and the surrounding neighbourhood.
The law college’s five-year BA LLB course also adds a professional education facility to Kidderpore, an area connected to Diamond Harbour Road and Kolkata’s wider southern urban network. The available information does not include details of admissions, student capacity, faculty appointments, fees, transport arrangements or the college’s academic affiliation.
The conversion will therefore be watched both as the launch of a new law institution and as a change in the use of a historic school property. The immediate next milestone is the scheduled inauguration of Bishop Canning Law College on November 5 at the Kidderpore campus.
