Why it looks like this

The British needed a harbour for the coalfields they had found inland, so in 1912 they laid out a new port on the Bonny River and named it after the colonial secretary, Lewis Harcourt. The railway to Enugu and a planned grid of tree-lined streets followed — Port Harcourt was long nicknamed the Garden City.

Then oil was found in the Niger Delta in the 1950s, and the town became the industry's capital: refineries, terminals and company compounds spread along the creeks, and the city grew far beyond its planned core into the surrounding wetlands.