Spencer Plaza
shopping mall in Chennai, India
Spencer Plaza (Tamil: ஸ்பென்சர் பிளாசா) is a shopping and office complex on Anna Salai, formerly Mount Road, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. The present complex opened in 1991 on the site of the historic Spencer & Co. department store, which had been destroyed by fire in 1983. It is widely described as India's first modern shopping mall and became one of Chennai's best-known commercial landmarks during the 1990s.
The complex combines retail and office accommodation and occupies a site of about 10 acres (4.0 ha). Although its total developed area has been reported at about 1,068,000 sq ft (99,200 m2), an Asipac survey of Indian shopping centres, Spencer Plaza was ranked eleventh nationally by gross lettable retail area in March 2010, at 530,000 sq ft (49,000 m2).
Name and background
The name derives from Spencer & Co., a business whose history in Madras dates to 1863. Accounts of its early years identify Charles Durrant and John William Spencer with the Mount Road concern from which Spencer & Co. developed. By the late nineteenth century the business had grown into a large department store.
“Spencer Plaza” enters the record as shopping mall in Chennai, India. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Spencer, Plaza and shopping can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Spencer Plaza” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Spencer, Plaza and shopping provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3493024. Authority coordinates are 13.061, 80.261. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1991, 1983, 2010 and 1863.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spencer Plaza” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.