Do Not Pass Go Page 30
It isn’t difficult to imagine that such activities were felt to be incompatible with the posh new neighbourhood that had been gradually establishing itself west and north from Bond Street, attracting wealthy plague survivors keen to start a new life away from the City’s half-timbered filth. In 1708, citing ‘drunkenness, gaming and lewdness’, the authorities suppressed what was then called St James’s Fair, but thirty years later, now just the May Fair, it was started up again by the architect and developer Edward Shepherd, who built a market house behind Curzon Street, with butchers’ stalls on the ground floor and an upstairs hall used as a theatre in fair fortnight.
Regrettably, though, the wrong ’uns returned, and after prohibiting the event again in 1750, it was soon accepted that the only way to stop semolina-chinned pissheads chucking pets in ponds was to stick houses over any remaining bits of field where such incidents tended to occur. Less than a hundred years after Thomas Bond laid out the first streets of what would become Mayfair, the entire area enclosed by the aforementioned thoroughfares – an area, it must be emphasised, very nearly the size of Hyde Park – had been completely developed with gracious homes.
Handy for the royal courts and parks, Mayfair has never seen its high-born reputation compromised: five years after Euston Station was opened, sedan chairs were still a common sight in its streets. At this time, the wit and author Sydney Smith claimed that ‘the parallelogram between Oxford Street, Piccadilly, Regent Street and Park Lane enclosed more intelligence and ability, to say nothing of wealth and beauty, than the world has ever collected in so small a space’. He was Mayfair born and bred, of course. Gouge a Mayfair pavement with the funnel of your battleship and it will indeed bleed dark-blue Monopoly blood.
Until just before the Monopoly era, I could have taken the Piccadilly line to Mayfair. Opened in 1907, Down Street station was officially subtitled (Mayfair), but as if recognising that underground public transport wasn’t quite the ticket for residents still mourning the death of the sedan chair, it closed in 1932. Walking up Piccadilly from Hyde Park Corner and hanging a left I walked right past Down Street station, those telltale ox-blood Edwardian tiles now framing a mini-mart. But there was an anonymous door in the wall which I knew was the entrance to an excitingly scary staircase down to the old platform level, and pressing my ear to its dusty keyhole I heard – and indeed felt – the pressurised hiss of air forced upwards by trains passing far beneath. ‘Good OK?’ said a voice, and righting myself I was presented by a concerned mini-martian. ‘Trains,’ I explained, pointing at the door, which I now noted was labelled IMR ‘PB’. ‘OK good,’ he smiled back.
The defunct station was the first of many suggestions that Mayfair liked to keep itself to – and indeed up – itself. I’d done a few laps of Grosvenor Square in my time, and enjoyed a memorable victory over a traffic warden in Berkeley Street, but ambling back along Down Street and up to the twenties blocks built over Devonshire House and its grounds, I realised there were huge swathes of this considerable part of central London with which I was entirely unfamiliar. So huge were the swathes and so considerable the part, in fact, that to prepare myself I first repaired to a café and ingested a mind-altering overdose of caffeine.
If I’d imagined Mayfair was going to be an ordeal – and the toff-taunting foot-dragger inside me certainly had – then I was to be mistaken. I can go so far as to say that my day in Mayfair was both enlightening and really rather lovely. On almost every street so far I’d been met by a building or vista that had somehow snagged itself on a passing century and so resisted the tide of time, but in Mayfair it was as if the four thoroughfares that enclosed the area had formed a temporal dam. The only trace of the nobles who developed London in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the names they left round the Monopoly board, but in Mayfair they’d somehow held out: the Duke of Westminster still owns a whopping 100 acres of the Grosvenor estate that made his family the richest in nineteenth-century Europe. I’d left my A–Z at home, but managed to navigate with wondrous accuracy from a photocopy of the relevant sheet of John Rocque’s 1746 map in my dog-eared Mayfair factfile.
Liberated at last thanks to Vic and Marge’s cavalier final choice from trooping dutifully up one particular pavement and back down the one opposite I roamed happily at will in a spirit of eager inquiry: here was a place where history had been made. Standing at the junction of Chesterfield Street and Charles Street I could see four blue plaques without moving: the Duke of Clarence, Lord Rosebery, Somerset Maugham and Beau Brummell – a future King, a Prime Minister, a literary notable and a big ponce.
Still insulating its inhabitants so effectively from the noise and filth of the city, Mayfair seems more like a bijou principality, a walled kingdom of immense wealth and privilege: Monaco, perhaps, without the Ray-Bans. And so it once was: this, I remembered, was where the Upper Three Thousand had worked, rested and played, or rather buggered about, rested, and buggered about again. The thirties were their last hurrah, and they made the most of it.
This was the golden age of the wizard wheeze: Bentleys chased each other through Mayfair at three in the morning, their Pimms-addled passengers struggling over the not especially cryptic clues of a West End treasure hunt; imbecilic Bertie Woosters pinched policemen’s helmets or yodelled from the Berkeley Square lampposts. Parties were held with every guest dressed as a baby, and others where all-in wrestlers hired in East End pubs grappled on the Persian rugs – after one such gathering, the evening’s sweating, pug-faced victor found himself betrothed to a high-born society lovely. They smoked, they gambled and – as anyone who’s seen Gosford Park will tell you – said ‘fuck’ all the time. And check this out: ‘As the period advanced, the “Mayfair accent” changed remarkably from an over-sweet rather French lisp to a rasping tone that had traces in it of Cockney, American and Midland provincial.’
The transatlantic element of the linguistic trinity suggested by Robert Graves had been heard with increasing volume across the capital for over three hundred years. Pocahontas was the first American to visit London (there’s one for the next pub quiz), stretching that inaugural hand across the ocean with such graceful élan that it’s probably best to gloss over her unfortunate demise at Gravesend on the way home in 1617. Obviously that whole war of independence business put a bit of a brake on the tourist trade, but in 1786 John Adams, later the second president of the United States, focused American attention on Mayfair by establishing the first US Embassy at Grosvenor Square.
As the comfort and reliability of transatlantic travel improved the area became very much the hang-out for future presidents: Theodore Roosevelt got married in Hanover Square, and in 1905 his fifth cousin Franklin honeymooned at Brown’s Hotel in Dover Street, just down from Berkeley Square. But the American love affair with Mayfair was most fulsomely consummated during the Second World War, when huge numbers of US military and diplomatic staff set up camp around the Dorchester HQ of Dwight D. – another president-in-waiting, of course.
Throughout the war Grosvenor Square was known as Eisenhowerplatz, and the occupying army even managed to take some booty home. We might not have appreciated the stark idiocy of pulling all those grand residences down but the Americans certainly did: the drawing room of Lansdowne House, most splendid of the Berkeley Square mansions, has been reconstructed in Philadelphia’s Museum of Arts and its dining room, rescued at the same time, now graces the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
As I trundled happily about, the evidence of the continuing American influence in the area was unavoidable – principally around that great Holiday Inn of an embassy in Grosvenor Square. Here the effects of ‘the current climate’ were almost overpowering: roadblocks, twitchy coppers in flak jackets and posters in two almost adjacent shops in South Audley Street loudly announcing ‘Yes: we have gas masks!’. There are memorials to both Franklin and Dwight in the huge Grosvenor Square garden, and great Stars and Stripes banners hung over porticos all around, most notably down Brook Street outside the
Harrods-like block of Claridge’s, chosen London residence of glitzy Yanks from F. Scott to Jackie O.
But it was in a slightly obscure and otherwise entirely unremarkable cake slice of park behind Mount Street that the full extent of America’s romantic attachment to Mayfair was spelled out, in tiny plaques on perhaps two hundred benches crammed armrest-to-armrest on both sides of every path. Dedicated to the memories of Lytton Warwick Doolittle, Gustave Schimmer IV and additional names of incontrovertibly transatlantic origin, these told of a national attachment of long standing. Many were appended with touchingly personal postscripts, remembering ‘two Philadelphians who loved London’ or the ‘American who made his home here’.
I can only suppose that by retaining its genteel eighteenth-century ambience, Mayfair somehow encapsulates the American ideal of England as a Regency theme park – a quarter whose gracious and immaculate streets might have been paved with gold, yet so ubiquitously privileged that even if they actually were you wouldn’t catch anyone nipping out at 3 a.m. with a crowbar and a flat-bed truck. Mayfair sure knows how to ham it up for the Lytton Warwick Doolittles: all those rows of unadulterated and pristine brown-brick Georgian houses, all those cobbled mewses where the coachmen who once groomed their horses were now chauffeurs polishing Bentleys. And gee, Gustave – those plane trees dropping their leaves on to Berkeley Square were planted when George Washington was president.
Wearier than most of high-octane urban excitements, Americans must love Mayfair for its absence of traffic and bustle. Dawdling up a steep and narrow path crowned unexpectedly by a quiet pub it was difficult to accept that six lanes of cars were steaming down Park Lane just to my left, or that a brisk and brief march ahead lay Oxford Street, flanked by Britain’s busiest pavements. With so many of its stately residences now regally swish embassies or brass-plate company headquarters, Mayfair in office hours recalls the set of a costume drama during an actors’ strike. So unusual are family homes in the area that they’re obliged to deflect confused motorcycle couriers and Bahamian visa-seekers with little plaques warning ‘This is a private residence’.
It only occurred to me later that these notices might equally have been posted to deter the least welcome of all mistaken punters. Mayfair has always had a connection with the ritzier ladies of the night: in the thirties, their pimps had them fitted for colour coordinated ‘uniforms’ that, when they began to fade, were passed on to those working less salubrious beats. Across all Europe, only Berlin could boast trendier trollops: there, apparently, a fashion for winter sportswear was followed so slavishly that girls stood on street corners carrying pairs of skis, an initiative regrettable in terms of both professional practicality and ‘snow-job’ jokes.
Mayfair’s streets are still no strangers to urban courtesans – as Jeffrey Archer probably won’t tell you, though there’s no harm asking. (And asking and asking and asking until he goes all yellowy and dies.) Walking into Shepherd Market, a warmly fetching maze of mini-squares, I remembered its enduring connection with the sort of Monopoly player who, presented with that £2,000 hotel bill, might have squeaked, ‘What – for an hour?’
The working girls who patronised the oddly proletarian takeaways and caffs of Shepherd Market were all still asleep, of course, but idling Tube-wards through its empty, flagstoned passages I could be thankful that I was at least heading in the right socio-economic direction for my imminent free fall back round the board. Because though this was, by tradition, the moment for my where-next roll of the dice, there was now no need, no point: seven sets down and just one to go.
CHAPTER 17
The Browns
AS A TEARFULLY drunk Tony Blair might one day confess, I’ve grown to love the brown set. Something about them appeals to my innate sense of economy – for £500 you could roll out the red plastic across both their pavements – and they also seem to inspire a typically British sympathy for the underdog.
Like all players, in my early years I instinctively derided the browns and heaped jeering scorn upon their unfortunate landlords: thirty quid rent – what, with two houses on? Well, I’m rather afraid that makes you both ugly and stupid. To buy a single brown was to express footballing allegiance to Carlisle United; those who coveted the pair might just as well have paraded around the playground with a Golf Sale-style placard identifying their father as the openly gay owner of a Datsun Sunny estate. No, an affection for what must be the second most famous set on the board could only develop after many years’ play, as a sort of post-modern perversion.
It was partly a tactical move: no competitor minded paying your puny hotel bills, because they did so in the happy knowledge of a narrow escape at Mayfair. They’d expansively peel off the notes as if about to ruffle your hair in the most patronising fashion possible, if only it wasn’t so matted and nit-ridden. And just as no one ever wanted to do deals with the flash-arse proprietor of the dark blues, so as smut-nosed Master Brown you were nearly always indulged with extra leverage in the title-deed horse trading. The browns, no less, were imbued with a sort of stubborn grunge chic, a proto-punk pride in poverty.
It was nonetheless indicative of my shaming ignorance of London’s right-hand side that I saddled myself with an epic trek from Bethnal Green Tube, which I’d imagined could only be a short lapel-clutching, knees-up jaunt away to the site of the modest place of worship whose pale stonework inspired fourteenth-century Londoners to christen both street and area with a disappointingly unintriguing statement of the bleeding obvious. The East End is a lot bigger than you’d imagine, particularly if you’re me. For the first time, I was off home soil. Spherical shell-suited women were almost queuing up to elbow me off the pavement, and at my first junction I was faced by a whelk stall and a pub that aggressively identified itself as the Brit. It might have been worse if either had been open.
In truth, though, the East End has in historic terms become associated only recently with professionally violent connoisseurs of pickled seafood. So genteel and prosperous was the area in the early nineteenth century that strolling up Brick Lane during a visit to London, Tsar Nicholas I loudly blared, ‘But where are your poor?’. The term ‘East End’ wasn’t coined until the 1880s, and only acquired seriously downbeat connotations during the soul-searching inquiries into prostitution and poverty that followed in the bloody wake of Jack the Ripper, perpetrator of what are still known as the Whitechapel Murders.
It’s been claimed that a greater proportion of London men visit prostitutes – one in eleven, apparently – than do the male residents of any other British city. Lord alone knows how they went about procuring this statistic, though my bet is that it didn’t involve a show of hands in a crowded railway carriage. But my hands-on experience (yes, yes) in King’s Cross had clearly demonstrated the tradition’s endurance, one encapsulated in a thirties joke that neatly spans the board. Oh look: here it comes now.
Three impoverished sisters set out from the suburban flat they share for a one-night apprenticeship in the oldest profession; the eldest returns at midnight and the middle sister two hours later. ‘What’s six times two guineas?’ asks the former, who’d been plying her trade in Mayfair. ‘Well, what’s seventeen times seven and six?’ counters the latter with reference to her experience in Piccadilly Circus. At breakfast the youngest returns from Whitechapel with a breathless question of her own: ‘What’s 144 times ten pence ha’penny?’
Whitechapel’s tarts were usually alcoholic and, as the above thigh-slapper suggests, always desperate. Blundering into a network of light-industrial alleys I quickly found myself in Ripperland: tight cobbled streets flanked by ghastly, soiled tenements. I peered into a basement stairwell full of half-burnt pieces of furniture and rat-nibbled binliners and to my horror saw a sheet of opaque polythene being drawn back to reveal a jagged hole in the wall; through this laboriously emerged a tiny man in a collarless overshirt. I had Hubert Gregg’s funny feeling inside of me again, only this time it wasn’t quite so funny.
A helicopter air-ambulan
ce lowered itself noisily down on to the London Hospital, reminding me of a similarly unwholesome Whitechapel Road tradition of popular entertainment. Sauntering along the pavement opposite the hospital in 1884, and pausing to groom your vast handlebar moustache in the window between the pawnbrokers at No. 121 and the fruiterers at 125, you’d have found yourself being urged to come inside and behold ‘The Great Freak of Nature’. Awaiting within, once you’d handed over your coppers, was of course Mr John Merrick, who as we now know was not an animal, squelch, suck, rasp, but a human being.
I hadn’t realised that Merrick did rather well out of his notable deformity – he apparently cleared £200 during that Whitechapel run. And as well as being more lucrative, it must also have been inestimably less humiliating than his previous job: of all the rum facts I had recently acquired, there were none so very rum as the revelation that the Elephant Man once worked as a door-to-door salesman.
It was in the London Hospital that Merrick fatally cast aside that extra pillow, and his bones remain there to this day. Michael Jackson recently tried to buy them, perhaps unaware that the Elephant Man looked like that despite rather than because of a series of painful operations.
By the Merrick/Ripper era, the mercantile middle classes, initially attracted by the area’s proximity to London’s docks, had left their gracious homes in the elegant squares off Whitechapel Road and taken their liveried footmen with them. Driven away by the noisome fumes from sugar refineries and match factories, their former residences were split into cramped, unsanitary flats, and Whitechapel Road began to slip back round the notional Victorian Monopoly board. Dorset Street, scene of the Ripper’s last murder, was the subject of a book entitled The Worst Street in London (renamed Duval Street, it later witnessed a horrible gangland killing and these days prefers to remain completely anonymous), and the Salvation Army and Dr Barnardo’s both originated in Whitechapel. It even become de rigueur for Oxford graduates to take a year off after university to work with Whitechapel’s poor and needy – much like the current trend for doing voluntary service in deprived and distant lands, and in conditions that would presumably have been no less alien or squalid.