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Then and now.
Same avenue, sixty years apart. Slide the handle: a dusty township street on the left, the planted boulevard of today on the right.
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1960s · the township
Today · Anna Nagar
How a flood-prone village on the Cooum became India's model township — its Trade Fair, its Tower, its Arch, and a grid of avenues people still navigate by.
Same avenue, sixty years apart. Slide the handle: a dusty township street on the left, the planted boulevard of today on the right.
Before the avenues and apartments, this was farmland near the Cooum river — one of the West Madras villages alongside Aminjikarai and Periyakudal. In 1958, as the city swelled with migrants, the Tamil Nadu Housing Board launched the West Madras Neighbourhood Scheme to build a whole new town here.
It was an ambitious idea — an integrated township for every class of family, possibly the first of its kind in India: housing, wide roads, schools, parks and bus terminals, all planned together rather than grown by accident.
Six decades on, the planned town has everything a family needs within a few avenues — and it's one of Chennai's most connected, walkable neighbourhoods.
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