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  In 1937, when most of its customers were still local nobs, Bond Street’s commercial establishments included 36 gown shops, 32 milliners, 5 motor dealers, 8 antique shops, 17 art galleries, 12 photographers, 10 tobacconists, 21 jewellers and – guh? – 58 cosmetic companies. Bin the garages, snappers, hatters and fag firms (even Benson & Hedges seems to have gone now) and nothing would appear to have changed, though in fact the street did also host sufficient vendors of more prosaic goods – there was a Lyons Tea Shop and even a Woolworth’s – for one commentator to call it ‘the High Street of some Utopian village’. At that time, Bond Street’s retail establishments claimed to satisfy all human needs, but if you weren’t allowed to shop anywhere else today you’d be seeing out your diminutively numbered days on an unadulterated diet of Charbonnel & Walker chocolates, effecting any DIY needs with a Dunhill shooting stick and getting tanked up every night on Chanel No. 5.

  As in life, so, as ever, on the Monopoly board. Pretentiously overpriced as it has always been – ‘75 per cent off – all trousers on this rail now £400’ – Bond Street remains the perfect embodiment of a set which promised prestige rather than profit. The greens offer a shocking rate of return: at £200, its houses cost the same as the dark blues, yet a hotel on Bond Street produces £600 less than one on Mayfair. Even overlooking its unexciting performance in Chris’s probability program, Bond Street offers an abysmal price-to-earnings ratio: in terms of development cost to hotel rent, the king of no other set performs as badly. As Mike Grabsky had suggested, Bond Street is a rip-off.

  But I don’t think it was so much the shockingly exorbitant prices that upset me (to employ a literary device known as lying) as that wearisome, po-faced pretentiousness. It was terrible to think that what was now Dolce & Gabbana had in the Monopoly era been the raffish and sometimes raucous Embassy Club, the Café de Paris’s main rival for the patronage of that Upper Three Thousand. Forcing my way map first into Prada through another five-man defensive wall I bumped into two women of late middle years, who I’m afraid I shall have to describe as painted crones.

  ‘So of course I had to tell her she was making a complete fool of herself,’ said the one who looked slightly less like Fanny Cradock, eliciting a nod of prim approval. To walk down Bond Street is to play a bit part in an episode of Absolutely Fabulous where everyone looks like Edina but acts like her dull daughter.

  The street’s AbFab credentials had been firmly cemented in my mind by an article I’d recently read about the phenomenon of kabbalah, described within as ‘the hottest society pastime in London’. Madonna, Jerry Hall and almost anyone who has ever written ‘socialite’ in the box marked occupation are, I’d learned, among the 2,500 who have made the trek to the Kabbalah Centre above the Vidal Sassoon salon in New Bond Street. Based loosely – like, belt-off-and-dropped-round-the-ankles loosely – on Judaism, with a spicy dollop of the occult thrown in, to its adherents kabbalah is a ‘pathway to truth’, though to the rest of us it is a room above a hairdresser’s where people pay £151 in exchange for a piece of red string. Worn round the wrist, this is both a spiritually recharging charm bracelet to help guide you along that truth pathway, and a handy way of identifying you to the shopkeepers of Bond Street as a valued customer: not only far too rich but childishly gullible to boot. ‘Improving people’s lives’ is kabbalah’s motto; precisely how the philosophy seeks to achieve this is predictably unclear, but frankly that isn’t the point. In essence, the Kabbalah Centre seems to serve as a social club where people can say things like ‘I found Buddhism was making me too morbid’ and ‘Is this spiritually recharging or what?’ without immediately going down under a hail of angry blows.

  Naturally enough, Bond Street can boast a proud heritage in this fertile field – right back to 1856, in fact, when Sarah Levenson, a former East End fortune teller, opened a shop at 50 New Bond Street selling exotic skin treatments under the bold legend ‘Beautiful for Ever’. Beguilingly branded ‘Dew of Sahara’ and (splash it all over) ‘The Royal Arabian Toilet of Beauty’, these were eagerly acquired by proto-kabbalahan Bond Street ladies undeterred – indeed probably attracted – by prices of up to 1,000 guineas. Within two years Levenson was clearing £20,000 a year. Curiously unsatisfied with this income she began to forge love letters to her more grandiosely suggestible clients; purporting to be from prominent noblemen struck by the ladies’ alluring Arabian-toilet complexion, these successfully procured purchases of ever more monstrously exorbitant cosmetics. One widow was fleeced for over five grand. Levenson was eventually charged with fraud, and at her trial contributed to many quotable exchanges, most notably in regard to a stock of twenty-guinea bottles of water ‘brought by swift dromedaries from the River Jordan’. Having listened as she defiantly insisted that this fluid did indeed hail ‘from the East’, the prosecution lawyer paused dramatically before moving in for the kill. ‘That might mean Wapping,’ he said. She got five years, came out, did it again, got another five years and died halfway through her stretch.

  On I happily wandered, prodding oncoming fashion victims with my map, past Cartier’s topiarised Frenchiness, past gaudy caryatids guarding the Royal Arcade, past the marvellously eccentric Masonic castle of the Atkinson’s Cosmetics building. Tiffany proved surprisingly awful, its windows decorated with what looked to my mercifully untrained eye like the sort of jewellery you’d try and grab in the jaws of one of those quid-a-go cranes at a funfair, but Asprey’s – Bond Street shopkeepers since 1830 – exuded a regal timelessness beneath those Harrodsesque fairy bulbs. Almost everything it sold was ridiculous – straws, dice, miniature suitcases and other whimsical tributes to the silversmith’s art – but, uniquely, the staff seemed not to have let this corrode their sense of human decency.

  ‘The stones are at present in New York, sir,’ intoned a low and plummy voice as I padded in beneath the chandeliers. Its source was a chap dressed like the father of the bride sitting behind a desk with a telephone held to his face, who when I caught his gaze raised an eyebrow and half a smile in endearing self-mockery. Idly perusing some of Jade Jagger’s more capricious jewellery designs I was approached by a little bald man who inquired if I wanted any help: it was the first and only time a Bond Street retail operative essayed this stalwart gambit as if offering genuine assistance in a purchasing decision, rather than issuing a coded warning not to stuff displayed merchandise down my trousers. ‘The contrast between the old and the new is less apparent here than anywhere in London.’ Harold Clunn’s overview of Bond Street in the thirties remains an apt one: it still effortlessly exudes an ostentatious exclusivity that is the antithesis of Selfridge’s axiom about welcoming in all-comers regardless of whether they could afford to buy anything. ‘Oh, what an entirely wonderful bag,’ drawled a sweetie-darling voice behind; even the accents had barely changed.

  In fact, as anyone who heard Posh Spice’s address as she switched on the Bond Street Christmas lights in 2000, that isn’t quite true. As the Upper Three Thousand dwindled towards post-war extinction, so the shopkeepers of Bond Street took a deep breath, and forcing out smiles bravely welcomed in a new aristocracy – rough of tongue and ill of breeding, perhaps, but it was either that or fall foul of the maxim connecting beggars and choosers.

  The traditional lunching hour had long since come and gone, and having dismissed the option of despatching an £18 toasted sarnie in an overgrown toddler’s highchair at the DKNY in-store café, I entered Fenwick’s, Bond Street’s resident department store and host to multiple dining opportunities, with only one thing in mind. Theft. Surveying myself unblinkingly and at length in the mirror above the sink in the Fenwick’s Gents, I splashed cold water in my face as you were supposed to do in this sort of situation, then towelled off my big map of Europe as you weren’t. I’d been treated as a potential petty larcenist in almost every shop – Bond Street had given me a bad name, and now I was going to live up to it. A bracing slap in the chops, a loud exhalation. Let’s do it.

  Rarely have I broached such
a bastion of wealthily leisured womanhood: returning from my pre-blag comfort stop at the lonely beige urinal that had comprised the store’s male facilities, I passed an airy gazebo-style hall ostentatiously decorated with mirrors and flowers – not even the Ladies per se, just a sort of antechamber thereof. The second-floor restaurant was correspondingly well stocked with London’s ladies-who-lunched, many of them doing so with a tiny, boil-washed dog in their laps.

  I patrolled the dining area’s hushed periphery, but it was difficult to do so covertly bearing that 4-foot tube, and being followed about by several pairs of over-embellished eyes I accepted my criminal recce had for now been foiled: the joint was casing me. Momentarily thwarted, I downed a couple of escalators and found myself at the open-plan café. More people, more noise, more bustle – perfect.

  ‘Waiting for a table?’

  ‘No! No thanks. I’m, er, just looking.’

  If I’d seen the waitress approaching I might have been better prepared, and the legacy of this unsatisfactory response was a dilatory five-minute tour of the nearest non-catering department. This might have put the store’s undercover security operatives off the scent more effectively had it sold something other than girdles.

  Sidling back to the café I took up a less exposed vantage point behind a display of single-estate olive oils. With every table occupied, I was focusing on the one nearest the escalator, where three middle-aged Mediterraneans in gaudily immaculate gold-buttoned trouser suits were preparing to leave. One pulled a fat purse out of a slim handbag and I watched as from it she withdrew a twenty-quid note with the seasoned insouciance of a dog-track punter. She laid it on a saucer beside the bill, then exchanging low-key Latin pleasantries with her associates strolled casually away.

  Time had been freeze-framed but now jolted to fast forward. I moved out from behind the extra virgins and yes: there was my quarry on the tabletop, beckoning me over. A waitress emerged from the distant kitchen doors and I knew if she beat me there all would be lost. Chest vacuum-packed and mouth freeze-dried I quick-marched rigidly across and with a swift but hardly deft movement clattered a hand though the table’s soiled crockery and grasped my prize in a blanched fist.

  With all senses primed for fight or flight, but my brain already making clear which option it was backing, I buried the booty in a raincoat pocket and lengthened an already Fawltyesque stride towards the escalators. Scattering ironed slacks with my map I ploughed through the ground floor cosmetic concessions, barged the glass door open and hit the street. The hand on the shoulder came as Shanks’s pony prepared to break into full gallop.

  ‘Excuse me!’

  Unburdened by the map I might have wrenched myself clear and run for it, but as it was I sagged in defeat and winced slowly around to face my captor. A slight young man in a very shiny black suit, he instantly withdrew his hand in embarrassment and with it pointed at the pavement behind us. ‘Sorry, I think you just dropped something,’ he said, as if it had all been his fault. And there, now slightly more in need of a wipe down than before, was my slightly used teaspoon.

  Struggling to recapture the adolescent defiance which had inspired its liberation I continued to the end of New Bond Street, turned right and entered Tesco’s Oxford Street branch. Here as intended I provisioned myself with twelve crumpets and a jar of piccalilli, before walking back down Bond Street perilously (and of course repellently) conveying the latter to the former by means of the spoon.

  Bond Street boasts the oldest outdoor sculpture in London – an Ancient Egyptian bust over the door of Sotheby’s – but it also has the most comically inept. Afterwards I would learn that those two bronze figures gurning at each other from either end of a park bench were supposed to be Roosevelt and Churchill, but sitting between them with jar in one hand, crumpet in the other and that big map unfurled across my lap to catch any errant yellow matter I thought: the ladies who lunch mightn’s like what I’m doing, but old Dick van Dyke and this fat Popeye here surely won’t mind.

  I was five crumpets into my protracted outrage against epicurean decorum when an angular woman swinging a glossy Louis Vuitton carrier slowed to a halt on the other side of the road. At first she seemed merely curious, but as I watched, her Botoxed expression slowly curdled until she was fixing me and my two metal companions with a look of incredulity mixed with hatred. I elbowed Dick manfully (and in fact painfully) in the ribs and leaned my head on Fat Popeye’s shoulder; still she stared in appalled silence. I winked. Her eyes widened and she started to move away very slowly, as if evading a drunken Lord Camelford by stealth. ‘It’s OK,’ I called out slightly manically, flicking a Day-Glo cauliflower floret off the Faroe Islands. ‘Piccalilli first appeared in the eighteenth century.’

  She clacked away down the street; I turned to Fat Popeye with a Marcel Marceau shrug and, with some difficulty, traded sauce-yellowed map for age-yellowed board. It was always going to get tougher towards the end of my tour, and only after a visit to Jail and a couple of full circuits did I land on a question mark past Free Parking to procure a card that baldly read ‘Advance to Mayfair’. But Fat Popeye wasn’t watching. Having taken the scene around us in with a sweep of his gimlet glare, he turned a cold eye towards me and in a voice purged of all nautical frivolity, began to speak. ‘Never before in the field of human commerce,’ he intoned, rousingly, ‘has so much been paid for so little by so few.’

  CHAPTER 16

  The Dark Blues

  IN FACT I didn’t actually advance to Mayfair. Most of the properties up until now had been sort of interchangeable within their sets: I bet you didn’t remember that Trafalgar Square was King Red or Northumberland Avenue King Purple, but Mayfair was not just King Blue but King of Kings, an icon, a board-transcending legend. Succumbing to an inherent sense of Monopoly theatre, I decided it would be all wrong to go there before Park Lane. In making this decision I realised I’d cheated on almost every set – only the oranges and yellows had been covered in the correct order. But homing in on Monopoly’s business end, where only GO separates the gutter from the stars, the pearls from the swine, it suddenly seemed important to play it by the board. Park Lane, the perennial support act, would have to warm the crowd up for Mayfair once more.

  In the realm of urban appellations for hard-surfaced open ways, ‘road’ is fairly low rent – quite literally so in Monopoly, where it appears four times on the board’s cheapo southern flank and not once thereafter. But ‘lane’, if anything, is humbler still, suggesting a narrow and dilatory earthen path, one thinly travelled by nursery-rhyme characters.

  Such, for many centuries, was Park Lane’s existence. Its still slightly skewed progress follows the boundaries of the Saxon strip farms it bordered; later it was menaced by highwaymen and other undesirables. When Hyde Park first opened to the public in the early seventeenth century, Park Lane was still a narrow path along its western edge, with a tall brick wall keeping the deer in and the poachers out. It was just that: a lane by a park. Only in the 1760s did the first houses appear opposite the wall, and it wasn’t until the 1820s, when the bricks were replaced by view-affording iron railings, that Park Lane became an enviable address.

  That constricted carriageway was now a problem: despite the poxiness of its miserable girth, Park Lane was the only north–south through route for the commercial traffic that is still today excluded from Hyde Park. Horse-drawn buses en route from Paddington to Victoria, elegant carriages attempting to manoeuvre their noble occupants into the calm of Hyde Park, costermongers’ donkey carts, wagons and perhaps the odd flock of sheep: so hilariously bad-tempered were the ensuing jams at Park Lane’s southern extremity that they became a fixture on many sightseeing trips.

  Down at the Hyde Park Corner end on a mercifully benign November morning, the consequent overcompensations inflicted upon Park Lane were starkly apparent. Passing the first of the run of upmarket car showrooms that now define Park Lane at least as much as its hotels, I had recourse to consider just what an opportunity had been squande
red here. One of the world’s great city parks – 340 fetching acres of trees and water – lay alongside; yet somehow forgetting that this was what had originally attracted the wealthy to Park Lane, for decades the Clunnites had instead seen all those undeveloped acres as an opportunity to indulge their ugliest fantasies – a six-lane dual carriageway on top, London’s largest underground car park beneath. Everyone, they seemed to believe, shared their ardour for the motor vehicle, an ardour so passionate that once you’d slapped your great big road down the last thing you wanted was to shield its traffic from sight. Quite the reverse: whether the resident of a humble thirties semi along the North Circular Road or a guest at the Dorchester, you would certainly want your windows arranged to give the fullest vista possible of the roaring, speeding majesty outside.

  So Park Lane was reduced to a bypass, patrolled not by a leisurely procession of chauffeur-driven Hispano-Suizas but a furious, lunatic melee of cross-town chaos. And somehow, it’s stubbornly refusing to admit it was wrong: you won’t find many filling stations in central London, but there’s one on Park Lane, and those showrooms – Aston Martin, Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, BMW, Porsche – are still peddling a dream that has curdled right on their doorsteps.

  It’s hardly an auspicious introduction to a street fixed in the minds of the global millions who have played Monopoly on the London board as the second finest in the capital. The Duke of Wellington’s home, Apsley House, nobly endeavours to cast dignity on the scene, but marooned in traffic it’s shouted rudely down. Across those six lanes rises what is in effect the opposite gatehouse to Park Lane: the ten-storey Intercontinental Hotel, constructed in apparent homage to an irregular stack of fruit boxes behind a supermarket checkout. Apsley House has been famously endowed with the honorary address No. 1, London. The extrapolative contemplation that the Intercontinental might therefore be No. 2 set me off up Park Lane in what I suppose was an appropriately dark-blue state of mind.