Rice Memorial Church, Bengaluru

The Rice Memorial Church stands on busy Avenue Road in the Bangalore Pete, its colonial European form looking out of place among the temples, dargahs, bookshops and traffic of the old market district. Its name honours Rev. Benjamin Holt Rice (1814–1877) of the London Missionary Society, a Canarese scholar and pioneer of education in the Pete, who reached Bangalore in 1837, learnt Canarese within nine months and preached in it and in Tamil. He wrote textbooks for the first Canarese girls' school, now Mitralaya Girls High School, and founded an Anglo-Vernacular School at Sultanpet in 1847.

The site has held a church since William Campbell's Canarese chapel of 1834, which Rice's London Mission Canarese Chapel replaced. The building has been pulled down and rebuilt at least three times; the present stone church, a European Classical design of pediments, Tuscan columns and windows under keystone arches, was consecrated in 1917. Conservationists want it on the heritage list, as plans to widen Avenue Road threaten it.