Abstract: The toroidal dimensional reduction of gravity to two dimensions exposes an integrable structure based on an affine symmetry. It is a long-standing question to describe gauge deformations of the reduced theory and whether or not the deformed theory can be consistently embedded in a higher dimensional theory. These questions could be addressed for the first time using exceptional field theory and the method of generalised Scherk-Schwarz reductions in work with G. Bossard, F. Ciceri and G. Inverso.