Lodhi Garden
Lady Willingdon Park
Ninety acres of lawn and jogging path wrapped around fifteenth-century tombs.
Before the park there was a village called Khairpur, built among the tombs; in 1936 its residents were moved and the ground was landscaped as a garden for the Viceroy's wife. What survived the redesign is a remarkable set of Sayyid and Lodi funerary buildings: the octagonal tomb of Mohammed Shah, the Bara Gumbad with its attached mosque and its extraordinary painted-plaster ceiling, the tiled Sheesh Gumbad, and the tomb of Sikander Lodi inside its own walled enclosure.
The park is now the closest thing Delhi has to a shared living room for its centre — walkers before dawn, yoga circles, students, bird-watchers after the parakeets and hornbills, wedding photographers negotiating for the Athpula bridge. The monuments are neither fenced off nor explained much, so people picnic against six-hundred-year-old walls without ceremony. It is the most casual encounter with medieval architecture available anywhere in the city.
- 01Bara GumbadA domed structure with an attached mosque of 1494 and richly worked incised plaster inside.
- 02Sheesh GumbadThe glazed-tile dome, still holding traces of the blue that once covered it.
- 03AthpulaA Mughal-era eight-piered bridge at the northeast corner, over what is now an ornamental stream.
Free and open from sunrise. Enter from the Lodhi Road gate for the tombs, or from Max Mueller Marg for the rose garden and the bonsai house.