Strolling back the Years
Reflections on livelier times
Published in The World of Interiors, April 2021
For 15 years before March 2020, living in Mayfair was a ball. One was swept along in a current of seemingly infinite divertissements, from gallery openings to delicious dinners, sparkling clubs and magnificent auctions. One had to do very little – it was all there before you, a sort of glittering all-inclusive (or exclusive) Butlin’s camp. It was a delightful routine, even if relentless, and one which left little time for looking beyond that day’s attraction.
Then came the pandemic. Overnight, the music stopped, and those of us who remained in the neighbourhood woke up to a very different Mayfair. With the palaces of excess now shuttered, we suddenly had time to stop, to look around. The new silence allowed us to listen to the sounds of previous generations. New sounds, and sights, also came out of these months of silence: a woodpecker on Park Lane; an owl perched atop the Henry Moore by the Serpentine. One saw and met other residents, previously invisible among the transient multitude of office workers and visitors. One noticed details such as the old-fashioned milk bottles daily delivered to Apsley House, in the same family since 1807.
I set out on daily walks and resolved to learn and write about the buildings whose facades look onto Green Park. I discovered that the one in which we live had, in its 17th-century incarnation, housed the Venetian embassy. My parents, next door, occupied Fanny Burney’s old lodgings where Sir Walter Scott would visit. The closed Ritz hotel was perhaps the most striking sight of the Piccadilly pandemic. No fluttering flag on the roof, no champagne-infused selfies on its famous steps, its Rivoli arcade shuttered. But instead, a whole line-up of benign ghosts, led by the exiled King Zog of Albania and his entourage of 30, including his right man, Sotir Martini, who weekly would settle the royal tab in gold, and Evelyn Waugh lunching on caviar, grouse and peaches. My friend Nina told me how her parents and two dogs would visit the Ritz during the Blitz, when meals were served in a basement of sandbags and boiseries, a particularly safe environment thanks to the hotel’s impregnable combination of a self-supporting steel structure and load-bearing walls.
Long-lost buildings would return as I wandered the empty streets, such as the terrace of houses replaced in the late 1960s by the Intercontinental Park Lane: No 145, from which the ten-year old Princess Elizabeth would write lovingly about Snowball, her pony; and “Hippiedilly”, Sid Rawle’s squatter camp at 144, scene of Piccadilly’s own ponytailed summer of love in 1969.
The neighbourhood was at its most effervescent in Georgian times, and while many of the most extravagant structures of this period (such as William Kent’s Devonshire House or the gothic Pomfret Castle) are long gone, we can still admire Coventry House (once the famed St James’s Club and, in 2017, the first school to open in Mayfair for two centuries) and its Robert Adams interiors, William Kent’s Wimborne House and, of course, Spencer House. It takes only a very small amount of fanciful musing when visiting Pret a Manger to be transported to the macao tables of Watier’s Club presided over by Beau Brummel, its linen-bedecked perpetual president, or when buying an oyster card at Green park station to dream of the white burgundies that lay here when this was the Duke of Devonshire’s wine cellar. By the time one reaches the Hard Rock Cafe, one is almost not surprised to learn that Lord Elgin’s Parthenon rocks were displayed here when first they came to England, and frowned upon by Lord Elgin, who lived nearby.
I am looking forward to the day the music starts again and the ball resumes. But, in future, there will always be a space on my dance card for Fanny Burney, Sid Rawle and King Zog.
Illustration by Lucinda Rogers