If you play the game Monopoly you will notice that the most expensive houses are in Mayfair. And this reflects reality: Mayfair is one of the richest parts of London, if not the world. It’s called Mayfair because there was a fair here during the month of May. It was mainly rural, but that began to change after the Great Fire of London of 1666. After that rich people began to move here from the City. One family, the Grosvenors, did particularly well.
George Prow, who conducts tours of Mayfair and other parts of London with his company, The Tour Hub, takes up the story:
George Prow (standard British accent): The Grosvenor family, who purchased land here in Mayfair in 1677 and they went on to extend that land and become the most wealthy and important landowners in Mayfair for the next centuries, and they still are today, and they are the wealthiest landowners in the whole of London, and the Grosvenor family are worth a lot of money, and are richer than the Queen of England and the Crown Estates as well. So they became the Dukes of Westminster, which is a very grand title as well in the hierarchy of British society. So we have over £10 billion, in terms of the land and properties that are owned by the Grosvenor family. So that puts them at number one on the list of who owns London. Number two is the Crown Estates, so they’re worth around £6 billion. So effectively the Queen, through the Crown Estate, is worth £6 billion, so that includes all the royal palaces, parks, you know, obviously Buckingham Palace. So they’re the top two. Number three is the Cadogan family, who own most of Chelsea, which is another famous part of West London.
chocolate
Mayfair has a strong royal connection. The Queen’s parents, the Duke and Duchess of York, lived at 17 Bruton Street. She was born there in 1926, but the family moved to Buckingham Palace when her uncle, Edward VIII, abdicated in 1937, and her father became King George VI. Mayfair is in fact very close to Buckingham Palace and the area is also home to Her Majesty’s favourite chocolate shop:
George Prow: I mean, everyone loves chocolate, and especially the Queen, and her favourite being Charbonnel et Walker, who began making their chocolates 1875, and it’s always had a royal connection, so it was Edward VII who first met Madame Charbonel in Paris, enjoyed her chocolates and suggested she should come over to London and join forces with a Mrs. Walker to create these wonderful chocolates which have gone on to be the Queen’s favourite, specifically the Pink Champagne Truffle, which is very, very tasty and she likes to have these all around the Palace apparently, and they do sort of disappear quite quickly, she gets quite angry with the staff, I hear, when they’re depleted quite quickly, but a wonderful location and they have a royal warrant for their services, which means they get this special certificate, warrant, every ten years to make sure that they’re up to standard, but it’s a very big privilege for any business in Britain to serve the Royal Family in that way.
russian money
Charbonnel et Walker is in the Royal Arcade on Old Bond Street. And if you like luxurious living, then you might also want to check out Hedonism Wine in Davies Street:
George Prow: It describes itself as “the best wine shop in the world” and I definitely don’t disagree. It was created by a Russian entrepreneur who came to London and couldn’t find… he was here for a while, and it was his birthday coming up, he couldn’t find his favourite Rioja Bodegas that he loved and all the shops said, “Well, we could find it in about five days’ time and bring it over” and he was like, “Well, that’s not good enough!” So he didn’t get his wine for his birthday and, as a result, decided to actually create his own wine shop which is, I describe as a theme park for wine. There’s two floors, wines from all over the world, it’s probably the biggest collection that you could ever commercially go and visit, and wines that range from £15 to £20 to… well, there’s a £120,000 bottle of Australian wine which is made in a one-off or a limited edition flask, which is very special indeed and, should you wish to buy it, special wine-makers have to fly over to carefully reveal and serve the wine because it’s absolutely vacuum-packed and a very wonderful thing.
THE SECRET AGENT
The mention of Russians leads us on to the subject of espionage, and Mayfair has a connection with the most famous secret agent of all – James Bond:
George Prow: Ian Fleming was the original writer of the Bond series and he was born in Mayfair on Green Street, which is in the northern part of Mayfair, so Mayfair was his world. He grew up in this sort of high end part of British society and it influenced his writing and it sets the scene for the world of James Bond, that kind of feeling and air of illustriousness that James Bond is set in. So there’s many different connections. I mean, there is a Bond Street, not named after James Bond himself, that is a Thomas Bond, who actually was a landowner a couple of centuries ago, but we have Sotheby’s, which is on Bond Street. Ian Fleming never actually said that there was one particular person that he based James Bond on, but one theory is a friend of Ian Fleming’s called Peter Wilson, who was actually in the British Secret Service in the Second World War, and also became manager at Sotheby’s later on, and he was a very flamboyant character and some people believe that would be the origins of parts of James Bond as a character and in the Secret Service he had a... his Secret Service number, 007. So a very direct potential connection.