Wetherell

Bonus season has dawned again. Reports from agents in London’s best postcodes reveal that just as prices have edged back up to the highs of 2007 and sealed bids have again become commonplace, so too the annual contest for the best homes for finance kings has been revived.

City boys are back on the hunt for places they can blow their cash on, according to estate agents, as the bonus culture returns and the property market appears to be bottoming out.

When a young Cheshire baronet, Sir Thomas Grosvenor, married his child bride, Mary Davies, he came into possession of her substantial inherited dowry. It included several hundred acres of farmland that was ripe for development. It was 1677 and the land, which had previously been used to hold the increasingly rowdy annual May Fair, was subsequently turned into London’s poshest village: Mayfair.

When Thomas Barlow, the first Grosvenor Estate Surveyor, drew up plans for the 11 streets and Grand Square of north Mayfair in 1720, his vision was for a residential community. A century later, when architect John Nash designed Regent Street, he included shops and offices in his plan. A hundred years after that commercial uses like offices, shops and hotels had swept through east Mayfair and only a quarter of the houses in Brook Street were being used as private homes.

London's playground of the super-rich has always been a place that ordinary mortals - even high-earning ones - would rarely consider within their reach. But times have changed, and with them, Mayfair's rental prices, which have dropped 15-20 per cent since their peak in 2007.