New Delhi

The move from Calcutta was announced by George V at the Delhi Durbar of 1911, and the site chosen was the open ground south-west of Shahjahanabad, on the axis of the older cities rather than inside them. Lutyens and Baker laid out a plan of hexagons, roundabouts and immense sightlines, at a density so low that the whole of Shahjahanabad would fit inside a few of its blocks.

It is the only one of Delhi's capitals designed to be looked at from a moving vehicle, and the only one whose architects argued in print about a gradient. Where earlier cities absorbed what stood on their ground, this one landscaped around it: a fourteenth-century stepwell, an eighteenth-century observatory and a set of Lodi tombs all survive inside the plan, marooned in lawns and traffic circles.