Sunday 25 April 2021
Sitting down to write a 1,000-word guide to Mayfair is like sitting down to write the number six while simultaneously rotating your left foot in a clockwise direction. Not impossible but trickier than you might imagine. To keep it short, what follows is selective and subjective, reflecting the wide-eyed enthusiasms of its author, a bumpkin from the sticks, easily impressed by superficial big-city glamour.
A busy street in Mayfair
Getty Images
SOME BACKGROUND ON MAYFAIR
Much of Mayfair – bounded by Oxford Street to the north, Piccadilly to the south, Regent Street to the east and Park Lane to the west – belongs to the Grosvenor family. It came into their possession in 1677, when Sir Thomas Grosvenor married Mary Davies, a 12-year-old heiress whose dowry included some marshy, undeveloped land north of the Thames. The couple had three daughters and five sons, but things took an awkward turn following Thomas’s death. The boys had Mary committed to a lunatic asylum, where she died alone, estranged from her family and largely forgotten, in 1730. Nevertheless, Mayfair quickly evolved from swampy to swanky and the Grosvenors grew ever richer and grander. Queen Victoria made them Dukes of Westminster in 1874. Today the bulk of Mary Davies’ Mayfair parcel remains intact and is run by the Grosvenor Estate Trustees. The current Duke of Westminster is worth about £10 billion.