Look out of an aircraft window as it descends into Chennai and the coastline is the first thing that catches your eye. A long blue-grey edge against the city, with the sea on one side and the sprawling city on the other. From up there, it looks permanent, almost as though the line where the land ends and the sea begins has always been exactly where it is today.
Before Madras became a colonial trading centre, the coast was home to fishing settlements, and it was in this coastal landscape — between the Cooum and the Adyar and near the older settlement of Mylapore — that the English eventually chose to establish Madraspatnam in the 17th century, which grew around Fort St. George into the city we know today.
The coastline that greets a visitor today is very different from the one that would have greeted a sailor arriving in Madras two centuries ago. Even the Marina, one of the city’s most recognisable landmarks and among the world’s longest urban beaches, is not quite the wide stretch of sand it appears to be. Its present form is closely linked to the construction of its harbour in the late 19th century, one of the biggest changes made by humans to Chennai’s coast.
Besides providing ships a sheltered place to anchor, the harbour also interrupted the movement of sand along the coast. The present Marina developed gradually over a century, through the trapping and deposition of sediment following the construction of the artificial harbour.
And while the beach to the south of the harbour grew, the situation to the north was very different, says Karthik Gunasekaran, co-founder of Aram Thinai, an environmental organisation. The same breakwaters that trapped sand on one side of the harbour interrupted the supply to the northern coast, contributing to erosion along stretches of North Chennai.
As Madras grew into an industrial and commercial centre, more port infrastructure came up along the coast — Kamarajar Port, formerly Ennore Port, followed by Kattupalli further north — adding more breakwaters and structures to an already altered shoreline, says Mr. Gunasekaran.
Writing in The Hindu on January 25, 1959, naturalist M. Krishnan described a Marina that was a vast, open landscape, where fishermen mended and dried their nets, young boys hunted crabs, old men angled with primitive tackle, and herdsmen brought their buffaloes to bathe in the sea. Catamarans and traditional masula boats stood on the sand, while shells, crabs, and other debris washed up along the waterline. For Krishnan, the beach was also a democratic public space, where judges, lawyers, clerks, bosses and children shared the same stretch of sand.
However, urbanisation has changed the way the shore is perceived, often alienating fishing communities from the spaces they traditionally occupied, says Mr. Gunasekaran. “Earlier, there were 10 hamlets near Marina; now there are only three. The way we define a clean, good beach is also changing,” he adds.
But the changes were not confined to the north. Historian S. Muthiah, writing in The Hindu on August 21, 2002, remembered from his childhood a Marina that stretched from the mouth of the Cooum to the Adyar estuary. The southern end, he recalled, had once been so deserted that, as an eight-year-old, he could spend an evening playing on the sand without anyone coming to his rescue when his friends buried him in a pit.
South of the city, the sandy beaches from Valmiki Nagar to Uthandi remained relatively pristine until about two decades ago, but subsequent residential development and encroachments have left several stretches vulnerable, says T.D. Babu of environmental organisation Nizhal. “We might lose what we have left if these continue. Anthropogenic activities must be moved away from the beach. The entire stretch of ECR is heavily encroached, and hard structures have caused erosion,” he says.
At Marina, it is a vast public space filled with walkers, families and vendors; further north, the marks of erosion and coastal protection are more visible, while south of the city, the beaches from Besant Nagar to Neelankarai and beyond have seen residential development, recreation, and fishing activity. As the shoreline changes, so do the ways people use and experience the coast.
Today, climate change adds another layer to a coastline that has already been extensively modified. Rising sea levels, intense storms, and continued development are likely to put further pressure on Chennai’s shore. Could we be at risk of realising what the coast means to us only when, as the saying goes, the well runs dry?
Published – August 22, 2026 12:53 am IST
