New Delhi: Nikolaus Pevsner

A century ago this month, on 12 December 1911, the King-Emperor George V announced that the capital of British India would be moved from the European port of Calcutta to the ancient city of Delhi. A new Delhi would be built outside the walls of the seventh Delhi, the Moghul city of Shahjahanabad. And, despite an intervening world war and rising nationalist feeling in India, New Delhi was completed only 20 years later. As India was the jewel of the British Empire, cancellation was unthinkable. Britain was also in a hurry; as Nikolaus Pevsner put it, this ambitious imperial project was completed ‘five minutes before closing time’. A mere 16 years later, in 1947, the British Raj was wound up.