Anna Salai, which is more than 300 years old, is acknowledged as the most important road in Chennai city. The stretch is dotted with famous landmarks, statues, office buildings, hotels and commercial enterprises, many of which are heritage structures. It is the second longest road in Chennai, after EVR Periyar Salai.
Several flyover projects were under consideration on the road, many of which have been shelved owing to the construction of the Chennai Metro project, which runs along the median of the road. Anna Salai Head Post office, one of the most important post offices in the city, is located on this road. It was established in 1854 as Mount Road SO as a non-gazetted delivery office. With the growth of commerce and urbanisation, this SO was upgraded to gazetted in 1955. Nomenclature of this Head Post office was changed from Mount Road Head Post office to Anna Road Head Post office on 15 September 1974.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, Company merchants, civil servants and army officers who had grown tired of the noise and congestion of Fort St George purchased plots of land along Mount Road and set up "garden houses". These garden houses, unique to Madras city, were spacious private residences situated deep within their own compounds surrounded by lawns or gardens. Around this time, the land south of the Coovum River acquired the name "Great Choultry Plain", an allusion to the numerous choultries along the road where travellers could break for the day during long journeys.
By this time, the British East India Company were building an empire of their own. Thomas Saunders, Governor of Madras from 1750 to 1755, found the Governor's house in Fort St George inadequate and not befitting the stature of the residence of a Madras governor, and rented a private mansion along Mount Road at Chepauk belonging to a Portuguese widow, Mrs. Madeiros for setting up a "garden house". The house was eventually purchased and renovated in 1801 at a cost of Rs. 3lakhs by governor Edward Clive who also built the Banqueting Hall nearby at a cost of Rs. 2.50lakhs to commemorate British victory over Tipu Sultan in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War.
A marble cenotaph was erected at Teynampet to commemorate Lord Cornwallis, Viceroy of India from 1786 to 1793 upon his death in 1805. The cenotaph was designed to support a life-size statue of Lord Cornwallis that had been sculpted in 1800 and housed at the Fort St George. However, the statue was never moved out of Fort St George and a public park - the Hyde Park eventually grew around the Cenotaph which was on the banks of the Long Tank and made up for the statue. Hyde Park and its Cenotaph were frequented by the European population of Madras city and a band played at the park in the evenings. The Cenotaph was the most preferred recreation spot for the residents of Madras city till the creation of Marina Beach in 1884. The Cenotaph was eventually moved out of Teynampet in the early 1900s and the park closed down.
By the early 20th century, Mount Road began emerging as a favourite shopping destination among the city's elite, replacing Popham's Broadway. Shops included bookshops, watch, jewellery and furniture showrooms, departmental stores like Spencer & Co that sold cakes, wines and spirits, ice cream shops like Jaffer's, car showrooms and hotels like the Spencer Hotel, the Connemara or De Angeli's. In the decades following independence, the importance of Mount Road might have dwindled a bit with the emergence of other shopping areas like T. Nagar, but it continues to attract visitors.[citation needed] A large number of heritage structures on Anna Salai were built during this period and many have survived - P. Orr & Sons (1877), the Kardyl Building (1897), Agurchand Mansion, Higginbotham's bookstore (1904), the Gove Building (1916), offices of The Mail (1921) and The Hindu(1939), the Mount Road branch of the Imperial Bank of India (1921), all date from this time.
Anna Salai is maintained by the Tamil Nadu Highways Department. The road extends for a total of 11 kilometres and traverses the heart of the city.
By the 2010s, the stretch between Parry's Corner and Nandanam was used by over 16,000 vehicles during rush hour. Anna Salai is used by over 0.183million vehicles every day. The Metropolitan Transport Corporation in Anna Salai carries about 14,000 passengers per hour per direction.
Safety level
Anna Salai remains the road in the city experiencing second most number of accidents annually, next only to Jawaharlal Nehru Road (100ft Inner Ring Road), with one person being injured every 1.13 days. Together, these roads account for almost 14 per cent of the 5,101 accidents that occurred in Chennai in 2010. New traffic regulations have posed sizeable problems to motorists in recent times which was however introduced to streamline congestion issues.
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