Travel to Northern India: New Delhi: Photo 18

George V had said that he wanted the planners to proceed "with the greatest deliberation and care so that the new creation may be in every way worthy of this ancient and beautiful city." It must have seemed a bit late in the day to anyone following the career of Gandhi--or even reading E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. The planners went ahead anyway and laid out not only administrative buildings but a commercial center called Connaught Place, named for the duke who was the King-Emperor's uncle. W.H. Nicholls, the architect of the Imperial Delhi Committee from 1913 to 1917, wanted a great plaza, anchored by a new railway station. The railway authorities declined to build the station, however, and the whole undertaking began to drag and shrink. Nicholls had desired a ring of buildings of at least three stories, to balance the great diameter--1,100 feet--of the central plaza. (Apparently he was thinking of John Wood's Circus in Bath, or perhaps of John Nash's Park Crescent in London.) As completed in 1931 by Robert Tor Russell, Chief Architect to the Government of India, the ring rose only two stories. For a time the shops were stylish, but by 1981, Connaught Place had acquired this patina of decrepitude. Andreas Volwahsen, author of Imperial Delhi (2002)writes of the rings that "it is only a question of time before the last vestiges of Neo-Palladian architecture and imperial building are lost beneath cheap restaurants and new office blocks." (For more on the history of  New Delhi, see R.G. Irving, Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker, and Imperial Delhi, 1981.)

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