ABSTRACT
BY 1914 GEDDES WAS ENJOYING CONSIDERABLE SUCCESS with his Cities and Town Planning Exhibition. His work in Dublin had brought him into the public eye and he contemplated taking the Exhibition to America. He saw a chance of developing international links and he had already been invited to take the Exhibition to South Africa to the city of Pretoria.1 Yet in the end, for both pecuniary and personal reasons, he chose to go to India where he had been invited by Lord Pentland, Governor of Madras. He was always searching for extra income for his work and he assessed, quite rightly, that if he was a success in Madras, other invitations would follow. The governor network, especially the ‘liberal’ governors, friends of Lord Pentland, could be utilsed.2 On personal grounds, the East was a challenge. All his work, all his observations to date, had been in cities built by Europeans. The alien cultural context of the East drew him like a magnet.
