Fort St. George

Fort St. George stands on Rajaji Salai in the Fort area of Chennai, Tamil Nadu, and is the place where British settlement in India began. Construction started in 1640 on a coastal strip acquired by the East India Company agents Francis Day and Andrew Cogan, and the fortress, completed around St. George's Day, became the nucleus around which Madras grew. It is generally described as the first English fortress in India, and the surrounding White Town developed as the company's administrative and residential quarter while the Indian trading settlement of Black Town grew to the north. Over the following centuries the fort withstood French occupation in 1746 and a siege by Hyder Ali's forces, and it served as the seat of the Madras Presidency's government. The complex preserves a number of colonial structures within its walls, including St. Mary's Church, regarded as one of the oldest surviving Anglican churches east of Suez, the Public Exchange building that now houses a museum, the Clive's House associated with Robert Clive, and the tall flagstaff that is among the highest in India. The architecture combines military bastions, thick ramparts and a moat with Georgian-style administrative buildings in lime plaster and granite. Today the fort remains in active civic use: it houses the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly and the state secretariat, so parts of the campus are restricted, and the Archaeological Survey of India maintains the heritage areas open to the public. Preservation is uneven, with the older walls and church in reasonable condition and several outbuildings in modest repair. The visit is essentially a walk through the open grounds, the church and the museum, which presents the fort's story roughly chronologically through coins, paintings, weapons and artefacts of the company period. Visitors pay a very low fee as Indian nationals and a higher one as foreign nationals, and the fort is usually combined with a visit to nearby George Town, the High Court and the Marina waterfront to understand how colonial Madras was laid out.