Delhi

Old Delhi — Shahjahanabad, as it was when the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan built it in the seventeenth century — is the most overwhelming kilometre of city I have ever walked through. Chandni Chowk, the great bazaar street, runs from the Red Fort to the Fatehpuri Mosque, and every branch alley specialises in something: one street for silver, one for spices, one for bridal garments, one for the most extraordinary parathas you will ever eat at six in the morning.

The Jama Masjid, India's largest mosque, rises above all of this on a small hill and from its minaret — accessible by a narrow spiral staircase for a fee — you can see the entire old city spread out below, the rooftop water tanks and television aerials and kite strings forming a texture that is, from this height, unexpectedly beautiful.

Edwin Lutyens designed New Delhi as a statement of permanence — wide boulevards, Palladian government buildings, carefully spaced bungalows for the Indian Civil Service. The British departed six years after the project was completed, which gives the whole enterprise a particular irony. What remains is a city district of unusual spaciousness and architectural coherence, with Rajpath (now Kartavya Path) running from India Gate to Rashtrapati Bhavan as an axis of civic grandeur that few capital cities anywhere in the world can match.

Humayun's Tomb, built in 1570, is the building that Lutyens studied before designing his own work — and standing in front of it, you understand why. The proportions are perfect. The red sandstone and white marble, the formal Persian garden, the central dome that floats above its platform: it is everything that the Taj Mahal would perfect a century later, but without the crowds.