Marine Drive

This guide to Marine Drive in Mumbai starts in the 1920s, when trains dumped quarried stone into the Arabian Sea for a reclamation project meant to add over a thousand acres of new city, a project the press mocked as Lloyd's folly and Buchanan's blunder as costs doubled and the sea kept winning. You'll hear how nationalist lawyer Khurshed Framji Nariman forced an official inquiry that shrank the plan from eight blocks down to four, and how Art Deco towers rose along the resulting curve through the 1930s and 40s. It follows how a botched engineering scheme reshaped this stretch of the bay.