He was successful in obtaining the lease of a strip of land about 10 kilometres (6 mi) long and 1.6 km (1 mi) inland in return for a yearly sum of five hundred lakh pagodas.[54][55][56] On 22 August, he secured the land grant from local Nayak (Damarla Venkatadri Nayaka and his younger brother Aiyappa Nayaka of Poonamallee).[57][58] The region was then formerly a fishing village known as "Madraspatnam".[7] A year later, the Company built Fort St. George, the first major English settlement in India,[59] which became the nucleus of the growing colonial city and urban Chennai, grew around this Fort.[60] Post independence the fort housed the Tamil Nadu Assembly until the new Secretariat building was opened in 2010, but shortly afterwards it was again moved back to Fort St. George, due to a change in the Government.[61]