India's maximum city — street food, colonial grandeur, and the world's busiest train network
Mumbai is India at maximum concentration — 21 million people on a peninsula that was originally seven islands stitched together with colonial land reclamation. The colonial quarter (Churchgate, Fort, CST) contains some of the finest Victorian Gothic and Indo-Saracenic architecture outside England; Dharavi 10km north is the largest informal settlement in Asia and simultaneously one of its most productive industrial districts, generating an estimated $650m annually in recycling and small manufacturing. Mumbai's food is the country's most diverse: vada pav (the 'Indian burger' — spiced potato fr…
The islands that became Mumbai were ceded by the Portuguese to England as part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry when she married Charles II in 1661 — then rented to the East India Company for £10 per year. The EIC moved its headquarters here from Surat in 1687 and built the infrastructure that created modern Mumbai: the docks, the railway (1853 — the first in Asia), and the grid of colonial buildings. The 1857 Indian Rebellion prompted direct Crown rule; the following decades saw Bombay cotton merchants become industrial capitalists and the Tata family lay foundations of what is now India's l…