George Town is the oldest part of the colonial city, the dense commercial quarter that grew up outside the walls of Fort St George from the late 17th century onwards. It was once called Black Town — the name given to the Indian settlement that developed alongside the European fort — and renamed George Town in 1911 during the royal visit of King George V.
The neighbourhood is one of the most intense parts of Chennai today: narrow streets lined with wholesale merchants, each specialising in a single commodity (one lane for stationery, the next for plastics, another for electrical components). The architecture is a layered mix of British colonial warehouses, later Indo-Saracenic buildings, and Tamil domestic architecture from multiple centuries.
The Madras High Court complex, an imposing late-Victorian Indo-Saracenic building facing the sea, marks the southern boundary of George Town. The Rajiv Gandhi Memorial occupies the area near the beach. Several important mosques, Hindu temples, and Jain temples are scattered through the lanes, including the Wallajah Mosque (Big Mosque), which dates to 1795.
Walking George Town requires tolerance for noise, heat, and navigational difficulty. The reward is one of the most alive commercial landscapes in India.