Blog Culture & sights

2026-07-065 min readThe New Delhi Destinations editorial team

Twelve stops across the imperial capital, roughly 9 km on flat ground, four hours at a walking pace and about ₹400 in tickets.

The route in one paragraph, and when to walk it

Start at Vijay Chowk beneath Raisina Hill, walk east down Kartavya Path to India Gate, loop the princely palaces, cut north to Janpath and Connaught Place, then south through Khan Market to Lodhi Garden and finish at Safdarjung's Tomb. It is about 9 km with no gradient except the rise to the Secretariat, and it takes four hours at a stroll or six with proper stops. Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker laid this out between 1912 and 1931, and it is the only part of Delhi designed as a single composition, which is exactly why walking it beats driving it.

Season matters more than usual because there is almost no shade on the central axis. November to February, start at 08:00. March and October, start at 07:00. April to September, either start at 06:15 or do the walk in reverse from 16:30 and finish at India Gate after dark, when the lawns fill with families and ice-cream carts. Avoid the second half of January entirely: Republic Day rehearsals close Kartavya Path and the surrounding roads from roughly the 15th to the 31st, and security cordons will send you a kilometre out of your way.

Stops 1 to 3: Vijay Chowk, Raisina Hill, the Secretariat

Begin at Vijay Chowk at 08:00 and look up the hill. The dome of Rashtrapati Bhavan, the former Viceroy's House, is a deliberate hybrid: a Buddhist stupa profile over classical columns, with chhatris, chajja eaves and elephant capitals stitched into a European plan. The famous flaw is here too — Baker's gradient on the approach means the palace sinks out of view as you climb, a mistake Lutyens called his Bakerloo and never forgave. Walk up between the North and South Blocks for the sandstone gateways and the jali screens, then stop at the railings.

You cannot walk into the estate without a booking. Rashtrapati Bhavan runs pre-registered visitor circuits covering the main building, the museum in the old stables and the gardens; slots go online days ahead and require passport or ID details. The Change of Guard ceremony takes place on Saturday mornings at the forecourt with free advance registration and is the easiest way in. The new Parliament building, opened in 2023, sits north of the old circular Sansad Bhavan; both are viewable only from the road. Allow 45 minutes for this section and take your photographs before 09:00, when the light on the west face is best.

Stops 4 to 6: Kartavya Path, the War Memorial, India Gate

Walk east down the central vista, renamed Kartavya Path in 2022 and rebuilt with new lawns, granite walkways, vending kiosks and, importantly, public toilets — the previous version had none. The canals on either side once flooded regularly; the redesign fixed that. It is 2.3 km from Vijay Chowk to India Gate and the whole thing is open sky, so this is the stretch that decides whether your timing was right. Water is sold from the kiosks at ₹20; there are benches roughly every 200 metres and shade only under the flanking trees.

The National War Memorial, completed in 2019, sits in the space south-east of the arch: four concentric circles of granite walls carrying around 26,000 names, an eternal flame, and a discipline about it that the surrounding lawns lack. Entry is free, cameras allowed, phones on silent. India Gate itself is Lutyens' 1921 arch to the 70,000 Indian dead of the First World War and the Third Anglo-Afghan War. The canopy behind it, empty for decades after George V's statue was removed, now holds a statue of Subhas Chandra Bose. Thirty minutes covers both.

Stops 7 to 9: the princely palaces and the churches

Circle the hexagon around India Gate and you are walking past the town houses the princely states built to be near the new capital. Hyderabad House, by Lutyens for the Nizam, is now used for state banquets and closed to visitors. Baroda House, a Lutyens butterfly plan, is the Northern Railway headquarters. Bikaner House on Pandara Road is the one you can actually enter: restored into galleries, a bookshop and a courtyard café, with the Rajasthan government bus service to Jaipur still departing from the back. Coffee here is ₹200 to ₹350 and it is the best mid-route sit-down.

North of the hexagon, two churches complete the set. The Cathedral Church of the Redemption on Church Road, Henry Medd's 1935 building modelled loosely on Palladio's Il Redentore in Venice, is white, cool and almost always empty on a weekday morning. Sacred Heart Cathedral on Bhai Vir Singh Marg, also by Medd, is the Catholic counterpart. Both are free and both take fifteen minutes. Between them, the National Gallery of Modern Art occupies Jaipur House, the Maharaja of Jaipur's butterfly-plan residence, closed Mondays and worth an hour if the heat has already won.

Stops 10 to 12: Janpath, Connaught Place and the northern detour

Walk north up Janpath to Connaught Place, laid out by Robert Tor Russell in the 1930s as a Georgian double circle of colonnaded arcades. The Inner Circle's whitewashed pillars are the most photographed piece of colonial commercial architecture in India and the colonnade gives you the first continuous shade of the walk. Coffee, a bookshop and lunch are all here at ₹400 to ₹1,200. If you have energy, detour 600 metres east to Agrasen ki Baoli on Hailey Road: free, 108 steps down into cool shadow, and a jolt of pre-Mughal Delhi in the middle of the colonial grid.

Jantar Mantar on Sansad Marg fills the gap between the two: Maharaja Jai Singh II's masonry astronomical instruments from 1724, the Samrat Yantra sundial and the Jai Prakash bowls, ticketed at a modest rate and taking 25 minutes. This is the natural break point if 9 km was ambitious. From Rajiv Chowk metro you can be anywhere in the city in half an hour, and the second half of the route works perfectly well as a separate evening walk starting from Khan Market on the Violet Line.

The southern half: Khan Market to Safdarjung's Tomb

Resume at Khan Market, built in 1951 for Partition refugees and now the most expensive retail rent in the country, which is a Delhi story in itself. Eat, then walk 700 metres to the Lodhi Art District in the surrounding government colony, where roughly fifty murals by Indian and international artists cover the walls of Block 2 onwards. It is free, self-guided and takes 45 minutes. From there it is 500 metres to Lodhi Garden, whose Bara Gumbad, Sheesh Gumbad and Sikandar Lodi's tomb are the fifteenth-century predecessors that Lutyens' team studied when they were designing everything you saw this morning.

Finish at Safdarjung's Tomb on Aurobindo Marg, 1.2 km from the garden's west gate, ticketed at ASI rates and open sunrise to sunset. Built in 1754 for a Mughal vizier, it is the last great garden tomb in Delhi and visibly thinner in the proportions than Humayun's — the empire had run out of money and marble, and the builders reused stone from an older tomb. Standing there at the end of this particular walk, having started at an imperial palace built 160 years later, is the neatest closing argument the city offers.

Practicalities, and where to sleep at the end

Security and photography: no drones anywhere on this route, no photography of security personnel, and expect bag checks at the War Memorial and at Rashtrapati Bhavan if you have a booking. Toilets exist at Kartavya Path, Bikaner House, Connaught Place and Khan Market, and effectively nowhere in between. Carry two litres of water in summer and one in winter, wear trainers rather than sandals because the granite paving gets abrasive, and put ₹500 in small notes in a pocket for tickets and the ₹10 shoe stands. Total ticket spend is around ₹400 for an Indian passport.

Sleep at either end depending on your next day. Connaught Place puts you inside the walk with four-star rooms in the Outer Circle and side lanes at ₹6,000 to ₹11,000 and Paharganj guesthouses ten minutes west at ₹900 to ₹2,500. The Lodhi Road and Jangpura side is quieter and greener, with small boutique properties and guesthouses at ₹4,000 to ₹8,000, and puts Humayun's Tomb and Nizamuddin within walking distance for the following morning. The short version of this route, if 9 km is too much, is Vijay Chowk to India Gate to Bikaner House and stop — 4 km, two hours, all the best architecture.

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