Chennai: From Fort St George to a Megacity | 3D Timelapse

This is Chennai (Madras), Tamil Nadu, India, as a 3D model built from real maps and elevation data and dated from sourced records, with no AI imagery. In 1639 the English East India Company is granted a strip of sand between the Cooum and the Bay of Bengal, beside the fishing hamlets of Madraspatnam, and by 1644 Fort St George stands on it. The English live inside the walls of the White Town, merchants and weavers crowd the Black Town outside, and the far older temple towns of Triplicane and Mylapore lie to the south. Then come French warships, a 65-day siege, a Presidency capital of garden houses, South India's first railway, and a harbour built straight out from an open beach that changes the shape of the coast. From about 7,000 people at the start, it grows into a metropolis of more than twelve million. The record behind it: Henry Davison Love's Vestiges of Old Madras (1913), S. Muthiah's Madras, Chennai: A 400-year Record (2008), W. R. Cornish's census of the town of Madras of 1871, the Imperial Gazetteer of India (1908), the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1911, the Census of India tables, the CMDA's Second Master Plan, and Madras Musings and Sriram V's work for the landmarks and the harbour. A few dates you can check: the grant is dated 22 August 1639 by convention (Madras Day; some read the deed as July). The fort was begun in 1640 and finished in 1644, and St Mary's Church was consecrated in 1680. The French took Madras in September 1746 and handed it back in 1749. Lally's siege ran from 14 December 1758 to 17 February 1759. Chepauk Palace was finished in 1768 and the Black Town wall in 1772. South India's first train left Royapuram in 1856. A cyclone breached the half-built harbour on 12 November 1881, and the High Court opened in 1892. SMS Emden shelled the oil tanks by the harbour on 22 September 1914. The 15-floor LIC Building went up in 1959, and the city took the name Chennai in 1996. The tsunami reached the Marina on 26 December 2004, the Adyar flooded in December 2015, and SPR Tower H at Perambur reached 172 m in 2020. The population readout is marked EST. until 1871: about 7,000 in 1639 (Love, from revenue records), Bowrey's 30,000 in 1670 and Hamilton's 80,000 in 1718. The 1795 count covered only the Black Town (60,000). The 1822 figure of 462,051 is left out because Cornish judged it untrustworthy. From 1871 it follows the censuses: 397,552 in 1871, 509,346 in 1901, 1,416,056 in 1951 and 4,646,732 in 2011 within the old city limits. India has held no census since 2011, so from 2016 the readout switches, with a label, to the metropolitan area: 8.65 million in 2011 and 12.6 million projected for 2026. What is reconstructed: the town's outline in every era before today is drawn from the places the record names, old plans and the suburbs' founding dates, to within a few hundred metres, not traced from a dated survey. The first fort's shape is a reconstruction. The shore before the harbour is drawn 60-130 m seaward of today's beach road, from accounts that the sea came close to the road. The Marina's growth is shown in three strips filling between 1881 and 1940, while the real beach grew gradually over a century and still gains about 1.3 m a year. The erosion north of the harbour, at Royapuram and Kasimedu, is not drawn. Triplicane and Mylapore are older than Madras, but the model grows them from 1639. Houses are shown by era, not one by one, and there is no South Indian house style in the model. Tiled, whitewashed houses stand in for the chunam, tiled and thatched houses of the first century, classical blocks for the Presidency town (most real houses there were lower), brick and stucco for the railway age, then concrete and glass. The Emden's target, the reach of the 2004 tsunami and the 2015 flood are placed from accounts, not surveys. The fort has stood on the same spot since 1644. In that time, even the sea has moved. 0:00 Chennai today 0:11 Madraspatnam 1:01 Walls and Sieges 1:52 Presidency Capital 2:40 Railway and Harbour 3:31 Imperial Madras 4:18 Independence and Spread 5:04 Chennai 5:41 Metro and Flood 6:23 Megacity Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL) Terrain: Terrain Tiles on AWS (Mapzen/Tilezen joerd), from SRTM, GMTED2010, ETOPO1, NED/3DEP and other sources; see https://github.com/tilezen/joerd/blob... #history #timelapse #3d #cities