Delhi has not been rebuilt on top of itself: it has been rebuilt alongside.

01 Seven cities, not seven layers

The traditional count speaks of seven cities associated with this territory. The first on the list, Indraprastha, comes from a literary description in a Sanskrit poem rather than from an excavation, so it is worth counting it as what it is: a textual reference, not a dated site. The ones that follow did leave walls.

The first with clear remains is Lal Kot, which King Anang Pal of the Tomara dynasty had built in 1052 in what is today the south of the city. In the mid-twelfth century it changed hands and was renamed. From there the sequence accelerates: every dynasty that arrived raised its own enclosure a few kilometres from the last.

02 Why they kept moving

The reasons are mundane and they recur. The first is water: on a dry plain, with 669 millimetres of rain a year and more than half of it concentrated in July and August, supply depended on reservoirs and cisterns, and when a system failed or silted up it was cheaper to build somewhere else than to fix it.

The second is political and you do not need to go into it to understand the urban effect: every new power wanted its own enclosure, with its own walls and its own plan, and the surrounding land was available. And the third is material: here you did not have to demolish to obtain a site, because sites were plentiful.

03 What is left of each

And here is what makes the destination singular. Because no city swept away the last, you can now walk through the different ones in a single day: ruined walled enclosures, monumental gates, garden tombs and a twentieth-century city, all within the same municipality and twenty minutes apart by car.

It is worth warning that preservation is very uneven, and that unevenness is part of the visit. Some complexes are restored and landscaped; others are walls overrun by vegetation, with no sign and no ticket office. And the interiors are usually empty: bare stone chambers with a cenotaph in the middle and nothing else.

04 The last one is from 1931

The most recent city in the series is the one that gives the present capital its name: it was designed and built between 1911 and 1931 south of the previous one, with a plan of broad avenues, roundabouts and free-standing buildings that resembles nothing that was there before. And, true to local custom, it was not raised on top of anything: it was raised alongside.

That continuity of method is what turns the anecdote into an idea. Nine centuries after Lal Kot, the answer to 'where do we put the capital' was again 'a little further over'. The result is an enormous metropolitan area whose centre is not a point but a series of centres from different periods, all alive at once.

05 What Delhi leaves you with

It is a difficult city: enormous, dense, noisy and with a climate that works against you for half the year. You cannot walk it or take it in within a week, and anyone arriving expecting a compact historic centre will be disoriented by the first morning. There is no historic centre here: there are seven.

What it leaves, if you accept that logic, is uncommon: the chance to see a thousand years of urbanism set side by side instead of one on top of another. In most historic cities you have to imagine what lies underneath. Here you can go and look, and it is twenty minutes away.