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25 Mayfair Facts
Fact 1:
Le Gavroche in Upper Brook Street is named after a street urchin in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. The restaurant, which opened 40 years ago in 1967, was the first in the UK to be awarded three Michelin stars in 1982. Chefs Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay and Marcus Wareing have all worked in there.
Fact 2:
The London Plane trees that tower over Berkeley Square were planted in 1789 – the year in which the French Revolution began.
Fact 3:
50 Berkeley Square, which now houses Maggs Bros books, is said to be the most haunted house in London – haunted enough to give any psychic the equivalent of an electric shock, just by touching the external brickwork. 44 Berkeley Square – the former home of Lord Claremont – is said to be more benignly haunted by a servant of Lady Isabella Finch who owned the house in 1742. Naturally, he appears in a periwig and green livery.
Fact 4:
Henry Fielding, author of the bawdy romp Tom Jones, had a job as a showman at the original May Fair in Shepherd Market. Later he became chief magistrate of London and founded the capital’s first police force, the Bow Street Runners.
Fact 5:
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was born in a house in Bruton Street and lived in Mayfair during her infancy. Prince Philip had his stag night at The Dorchester.
Fact 6:
When it was constructed by Sir Robert McAlpine in 1931, The Dorchester on Park Lane was one of London’s most innovative buildings. Reinforced concrete allowed the creation of large pillar-free spaces and gave the hotel a reputation for being a very safe building. Both Dwight D Eisenhower and Winston Churchill stayed there during the war. In the year 2000, the BBC dedicated an entire programme to the London Plane tree outside The Dorchester in the series Meetings with Memorable Trees.
Fact 7:
The home of the Dukes of Wellington, Apsley House at Hyde Park Corner is known as Number One London because it was the first house encountered after a ride through the fields of Knightsbridge. In fact its postal address is 149 Piccadilly. When the 7th Duke gave the house to the nation in 1947, the family retained the private rooms, which they still use today. Apsley House is the last great surviving London town house – and the only house managed by English Heritage in which the original owner's family is still alive. A banquet is held there on June 18 every year to celebrate Wellington's victory over Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815.
Fact 8:
The Ritz hotel in Piccadilly was built on a site previously occupied by The Old White Horse Cellar, one of the most famous coaching inns in London. It was one of the first steel-frame buildings to be erected in Europe. The restaurant has so many chandeliers that its ceiling had to be specially reinforced. Launched by the legendary hotelier, César Ritz, it is now owned by Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay’s Ellerman Investments.
Fact 9:
Robert Clive – 1st Baron Clive of India – committed suicide with a pen knife at his home at 45 Berkeley Square in 1774. His death has been linked to a history of depression and opium addiction, although he took the opium to ease the pain of an excruciating illness. His pet giant tortoise Adwaita – The One and Only in Bengali – outlived him, dying in Calcutta zoo in 2006. It was said to have been 250 years old.
Fact 10:
In 1964 the Canadian billionaire and owner of Fortnum & Mason commissioned a four-ton clock, which is installed outside the Piccadilly store. Every hour four foot high models of William Fortnum and Hugh Mason emerge and bow to each other, with 18th century chimes playing in the background.
Fact 11:
The prolific inventor Sir George Cayley (1773-1857) lived at 20 Hertford Street. Among other things he invented self-righting lifeboats, seat belts and small scale helicopters, but he is most often remembered for his flying machines – including a working piloted glider. He modelled the principle of a lift-generating inclined plane as early as 1792 and is regarded by some as the inventor of the aeroplane.
Fact 12:
Gordon Selfridge, founder of the Oxford Street department store, had numerous liaisons after the death of his wife in 1918 – most notably with Jansci of The Dolly Sisters, Hungarian-born twins who had emigrated to the US in 1905. Dancers, film stars and spectacularly successful gamblers, Rosika and Jansci Deutsch were the A-list celebrities of their day. Crowds used to gather outside Lansdowne House – now the Lansdowne Club – in Fitzmaurice Place to catch a glimpse of them. In 1945 a film was made of their lives starring Betty Grable and June Haver. Jansci hanged herself in 1941. Rosika tried to commit suicide in 1962, failed and lived until 1970.
Fact 13:
The oldest man-made artefact in London is the Egyptian igneous rock sculpture over the entrance to Sothebys in Bond Street. It dates from 1,600 years before the birth of Christ.
Fact 14:
Suite 212 at Claridges was declared Yugoslav territory by Sir Winston Churchill so that Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia could be born on home territory. King Peter of Yugoslavia moved to Claridges with his queen after he was exiled in 1941. Legend has it that a spade full of Yugoslav earth was placed under the bed so that the prince could be born on Yugoslav soil.
Fact 15:
Mount Street was named after Oliver’s Mount – a Civil War fort in what is now Grosvenor Square gardens. It stood against the Royalists from 1642 to 1647.There was another fort opposite Apsley House at Hyde Park Corner.
Fact 16:
The poet Shelley ran off to Scotland with a 16 year old girl, Harriet Westbrook, when he was 19. He proved a poor husband, abandoning his pregnant wife and eloping again with another 16-year old, Mary Wollstonecraft. Harriet drowned herself in The Serpentine. Mary Shelley went on to write Frankenstein.
Fact 17:
Mayfair’s most eccentric dentist was Martin von Butchell (1735- 1814). When his wife, Mary, died in 1775 he had her embalmed and turned her into a visitor attraction to drum up more business. Doctors injected the body with preservatives and colour additives to give a glow to her cheeks and gave her glass eyes. The body, dressed in a lace gown, was embedded in plaster of Paris and placed in a glass topped coffin – which was put on display in von Butchell’s window. When he remarried, his second wife demanded that he get rid of his first wife’s corpse. It ended up in the Royal College of Surgeons, where 166 years later it was blown up in a German bombing raid.
Fact 18:
Architect John Nash (1752-1835) didn't do quite so well with Regent Street as he did with Buckingham Palace and Marble Arch He designed Regent Street as a ceremonial route from the Prince Regent's palace at Carlton House to Regent's Park, which was part of the master plan, starting in 1818. Less than a century later the Nash buildings were demolished. What you see today follows the style set by Sir Reginald Blomfield at The Quadrant near Piccadilly Circus.
Fact 19:
It was Lord Byron’s valet, James Brown, who established Brown’s Hotel in Dover Street in 1837. Alexander Graham Bell (right) made Britain’s first telephone call from there in 1876. Agatha Christie’s At Bertram’s Hotel is based on Brown’s. Guests have included Napoleon III, Rudyard Kipling and Teddy Roosevelt.
Fact 20:
Eero Saarinen, the architect who designed the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, received his first critical recognition in 1940 – for the design of a chair. It went into production at the Knoll furniture company. Frances Knoll was a family friend.
Fact 21:
Grosvenor Square is mentioned in the first line of Scarlet Begonias – by the legendary US rock group The Grateful Dead. Mick Jagger wrote Street Fighting Man after witnessing a riot outside the US Embassy in 1968. David Bowie’s iconic album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars features a cover shot taken in Heddon Street – now Regent Street’s food quarter. Rock star Ian Hunter – former lead singer with 1970s glam-rock band Mott the Hoople – regularly sings A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square in his concerts. The song was written by Eric Maschwitz while staying at the Ritz in the 1940s.
Fact 22:
Hay Hill originally led down to the valley of the River Tyburn (Ty Burn – two brooks), and the river still flows under Mayfair and St James’s today. Originating in the Hampstead hills, it reaches the Thames at Pimlico. Oxford Street and Park Lane were originally called Tyburn Road and Tyburn Lane. Brook Street is also named after the Tyburn. In 1666, a French watchmaker – Robert Hubert – was hanged at Tyburn gallows after claiming to have started The Great Fire of London. His claim was palpably false – he said he started the fire in Westminster, which was untouched – but a scapegoat was needed. After the hanging, the crowd tore apart his body.
Fact 23:
Until the 17th century the area was known as Portugal (after Portugal Street). Later on so many members of the Rothschild family had mansions at the western end of Piccadilly that it became unofficially known as Rothschild Row. (Alfred Rothschild astonished pedestrians by racing his carriage along Piccadilly, pulled by zebras). A persistent rumour that prostitutes were known as “dilly's” in the 17th century, and men went to the district to “pick” one has been discounted. The name comes from the work of tailor Robert Baker who made a fortune in the 16th and 17th centuries from piccadills, stiff collars made from lace – seen in portraits of Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh.
Fact 24:
Beau Brummel, the Regency dandy, is credited with the invention of both the suit and the necktie – neither of which did him much good. After falling out with the Prince Regent, he fled to France where he died in 1840 penniless and insane from syphilis.
Fact 25:
One of the words for a suit in Japanese is “sabiro” – thought to be a corruption of Savile Row. Try it. Evisu, the Japanese fashion house, has a shop in Savile Row called Sabiro.
