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.
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.
WHERE TO STAY, WHERE TO EAT AND WHERE TO DRINK IN MAYFAIR
It’s conventional to separate these categories but in Mayfair there’s no need. The neighbourhood’s top hotels all contain bars and restaurants that would warrant inclusion in their own right. Claridge’s, The Connaught and The Dorchester have hogged the limelight for ages. Quite deservedly, they still do.
What if you’ve only got one night in Mayfair? Drinks at The Connaught (the main bar at the back has a hall-of-mirrors shimmer that will make you pleasantly wobbly even before your first cocktail arrives). Dinner at Claridge’s (the Reading Room for celestial comfort food). Bed at The Dorchester (the dolly-mixture-toned Oliver Messel Suite if you’re feeling flouncy, the wood-panelled Eisenhower Suite if you’re not, with breakfast on your terrace overlooking the rooftops of Mayfair or the treetops of Hyde Park).
What if you’ve only got one night in Mayfair and you’d prefer to do all your eating, drinking and sleeping under one roof? Claridge’s. The pick of the litter.
MAYFAIR'S HIDDEN GEMS
Bellamy’s is more than the sum of its uncomplicated, French brasserie-inspired parts. Supposedly it’s the Queen’s favourite restaurant. Its proprietor, chef and manager all worked at Annabel’s in the Mark Birley days, so it also provides a link to that much-loved after-hours institution and, with it, an entire period of Mayfair’s recent past.
WHAT TO DO IN MAYFAIR
SPEND MONEY
You’re in the greatest entrepôt the world has ever known. Where to begin? With a Golconda diamond, perhaps, or a Fabergé egg. Another Warhol and a Richter or two. A Stradivarius violin. A Chippendale cabinet. An illuminated manuscript. A brace of hammerless self-opening side-by-side shotguns. You could spare yourself a little shoe leather and pick them all up at Sotheby’s. While you’re on your way in or out, look up and you’ll notice, above the Bond Street entrance, a black stone sculpture of what, from where you’re standing on the footpath, might look like a bodybuilder with dreadlocks wearing a lion mask. It is in fact the ancient Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. This particular representation was sculpted 3,500 years ago. She’s in good shape for her age. But she’s not for sale.
LOSE MONEY
Even easier than spending it, especially in Mayfair, which is thick with gambling dens. Try your luck at Les Ambassadeurs. It occupies a townhouse that belonged to Leopold de Rothschild, who did it up in a crazy pastiche of Renaissance and Louis XV styles. Forty Florentine craftsmen toiled for two years on the panels in the library. The staircase is a marvel. The kitchen is big enough to spit-roast an ox. Many of these original features remain and provide a suitably surreal backdrop for the high-stakes shenanigans at the tables. If you’re going to lose your shirt, you might as well lose it in interesting surroundings.
SPEND RELATIVELY LITTLE MONEY
If your visit occurs during the annual Handel Festival, ankle over to St George’s Hanover Square, where many of the concerts are given. The church was completed in 1725, shortly before George Frideric Handel became a naturalised British citizen. He was a regular at St George’s for the rest of his life, even setting exams for its organ scholars. The house where he lived, around the corner on Brook Street, is now a museum. By coincidence, another virtuoso who changed the course of musical history, Jimi Hendrix, later lived next door. Your ticket to Handel’s elegant apartments gets you into Hendrix’s psychedelic lair too.
SPEND NO MONEY AT ALL
Take a break from conspicuous consumption, thrill-seeking and high culture to reflect on human folly, the fragility of reputations and the rise and fall of empires. Mount Street Gardens, with its many benches and flourishing palm trees, is a pleasant spot in which to do so. Bring along a copy of Lord Denning’s 1963 report on the Profumo scandal. Cabinet ministers, showgirls, nuclear secrets, the works. The Duchess of Argyll – a quintessential Mayfair figure and It girl avant la lettre, beyond parody though not beyond sympathy – was a minor character in this complicated escapade. Yet the bit of the report that people remember concerns a series of snapshots that showed Her Grace administering a sexual favour to a chap who was not His Grace. The photographs had been used as evidence in the Argylls’ explosive divorce case earlier that year. They were taken in her second-storey bathroom at 48 Upper Grosvenor Street – two minutes from where you’re sitting in Mount Street Gardens. The misogynistic scorn poured on the duchess in the divorce-case judgement and the elaboration of its most salacious details in the Denning report effectively ended her social life. She died alone, estranged from her family and largely forgotten, in 1993 – not unlike another quintessential Mayfair figure, Mary Davies, two-and-a-half centuries before her.
Here are London's best neighbourhoods to visit:
