New Delhi and the World Monuments Fund
The World Monuments Fund is a major international private charity dedicated to the protection and preservation of monuments and great works of art and architecture throughout the world. As well as raising considerable funds the organisation is an advocacy and educational group spreading the word about the importance of humanity’s built inheritance. One of the most effective ways that this effort is advanced is through the biennial listing of one hundred of the World’s Most Endangered Sites on the World Monuments Watch List. This year the nominations are being considered from at a three-day meeting in New York in June and one of the nominations from India is the Lutyens Bungalow Zone of New Delhi. This somewhat misleading name covers an area of 2800 hectares, which includes the capital buildings, commercial centres, institutional areas and the bungalows and their gardens. New Delhi is the only complete city built by the British in India during 150 years of colonial rule and it is the largest extant work by Sir Edwin Lutyens – unlike Wren Lutyens did succeed in rebuilding an entire capital city. Although the heart of the city is formal and classical in plan it is not a Western city transported to India. Both Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker (Lutyens in particular!) synthesised elements of Indian and eastern architecture at every opportunity. The layout and landscaping is generous managing to be both Imperial and romantic.
There are three major risk factors that affect the city today. These are: a lack of sensitive development planning by the New Delhi Municipal Council; inadequate maintenance; and perhaps the most important threat – a political desire to demolish large parts of the city to rebuild at higher densities for monetary gain. Already large apartment blocks have changed the character and an hotel Le Meridian has disfigured the skyline as seen from the ceremonial axis.
With a population of twelve million people it has sometimes seemed politically expedient to criticise the low density planning of the central areas as an illogical luxury enjoyed by the few. Recently even the Prime Minister has jumped on this bandwagon and proposed the demolition of bungalows to allow the erection of high rise blocks of accommodation supposedly for the poor. There are also threats of demolition to individual buildings designed by Lutyens that are in private ownership.
The inclusion on the World Monuments Watch List for 2001-2 will help to galvanise the conservation interest groups and assist in the creation of international recognition of a city that is of world wide architectural importance and part of the mutual heritage of India and Britain. In the words of Colin Amery, our President who is Director of the World Monuments Fund in Britain, “New Delhi should enjoy the protection of a National Capital Commission, as happens in that other planned capital city of Washington DC. Washington is administered as a distinct region with tight aesthetic controls on new development that protect the spirit of the past but allow sympathetic new development.”
For the Lutyens Trust the protection of New Delhi is probably its biggest challenge.
