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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 lunat
Intrigue and romance were synonymous with Mayfair long before Bridgerton appeared on our screens, discovers Carla Passino.
If a part of London were ever to be crowned Queen of Romance, Mayfair would be it. The former home of Dame Barbara Cartland and the literary backdrop to Julia Quinn’s
Bridgerton (although the Netflix series was mostly filmed in Bath for Regency authenticity), it has witnessed love affairs, romps and liaisons as entrancing as any penned by either author.
Its very foundation rests on a wedding: the one between heiress Mary Davies and Sir Thomas Grosvenor, whose descendants would become the Dukes of Westminster. Their eldest son, Sir Richard, was the first to embark on a building programme that would turn an unremarkable estate into one London’s most fashionable addresses.