Why it looks like this

The British East India Company built Fort St George on an empty beach in 1639, and the city of Madras grew around it — 'Black Town' (now George Town) with its packed trading grid just north of the fort, garden suburbs spreading south and west.

But the map holds older cities inside it. Mylapore, with its streets running as a square around the Kapaleeshwarar temple and its tank, was a famous port town many centuries before the British came. Chennai is a patchwork of such absorbed villages, each with its own little street pattern, joined by long coastal roads and the second-longest urban beach in the world.