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  Studying one of the cowering huddles of pavement smokers that congregate outside all London offices, I was reminded how rapidly attitudes have evolved. It’s only ten years since the top deck of every London bus was permanently wreathed in a speakeasy fug, and it is astounding to recall that smoking was banned on the Tube only after investigators blamed the 1987 King’s Cross fire on a discarded cigarette falling into escalator machinery. (During the inquiry they discovered the scorched remains of five smaller fires beneath other escalators that had burned themselves out undetected in earlier years.)

  As I walked out beneath the Rothmans shop’s stripy Dutch gables a troop of busby-topped guardsmen marched from the side of St Jame’s Palace and stamped splendidly off into The Mall’s foggy morning sunlight. Before today, all Pall Mall had been to me was a corridor of blurred street furniture entered and exited at immoderate speed; already I could see it was going to impress me a good deal more than I’d imagined.

  The monarchy is still a part of Pall Mall, although because today’s royals either aren’t interesting or aren’t allowed to be, the connections are now limited to crests over regally appointed suppliers of waterproof clothing. Under Charles II’s enthusiastic patronage things were a little different, and Pall Mall rapidly acquired what was to prove an enduring reputation as a playground for the rowdier sort of toff. Sporting rough and tumble gave way to slap and tickle: Charles installed Nell Gwynne and at least one other mistress in the new houses springing up along Pall Mall. Gambling clubs began to cater for hardy pioneers bravely pushing back the boundaries of that money/sense ratio, and there were inevitably a broad range of drinking options.

  Ever willing to embrace the latest human vice, Pall Mall began to attract tobacco firms, and the street’s indelible association with smoking requisites was cemented in 1866 by the future Edward VII. Outraged at being banished to the smoking room at White’s Club for a post-prandial puff on one of his famous cigars, the then Prince of Wales went straight out and bought his own Pall Mall club – one where a chap could set light to tobacco wherever he bally well pleased. The Marlborough, as it was called, had an ideal heritage – the building had once been a gambling den with an in-house pawnbroker, and there was a skittle alley out back for those ‘paille-maille’ moments – and after its acquisition the Prince visited almost every day in order to mingle with cronies while cradling a huge brandy snifter and smoking his head off. He was big mates with the head porter, Warwick, whose fifty-year reign comfortably exceeded his own; he played billiards with courtiers in full evening dress and top hat. It was almost as if the adjective ‘clubbable’ had been coined for him.

  Almost. A friend and fellow member, the Italian-born artist Pellegrini, was once enjoying a morning (morning?) drink in the Marlborough when Edward joined him. Fancying a top up, Pellegrini nudged the Prince and, boldly eschewing royal protocol, drawled, ‘Be a good chap and ring the bell.’ Dangerous words to a man who beneath the funny beard and ribald banter was, after all, Queen Victoria’s son. Without a word, Edward duly rang; the summoned servant promptly arrived. ‘Please show Mr Pellegrini out,’ breezed the Prince, and never spoke to the artist again.

  In the 1650s British gamblers were getting through almost five million decks of cards a year and, keen to keep themselves a cut above the pack, the punters of Pall Mall began to seek more rarefied profligacies. They started making bets on how many cats would cross the street outside or whether that chap who’d fallen down on the club steps had fainted or dropped dead. In 1756, Lord Byron, your man’s great uncle, endeavouring to resolve a bet with a friend on whose estate had the most deer, fatally ran the man through in a Pall Mall tavern. It was no surprise that the silly wager which challenged Phileas Fogg to circumnavigate the globe in eighty days was taken on in the smoking room of the Reform Club, Pall Mall.

  In between throwing it down the drain, Pall Mall’s patrons did also manage to spend large amounts of money tarting the place up: in 1807 it became the first street in London to be fully illuminated by gas. Mainly, though, members lavished fortunes on club houses with columned porticos and double staircases hung with rare artworks. An £80,000 copy of the Farnese Palace in Rome, the Reform Club was twice as expensive to erect as its near contemporary Nelson’s Column, and in 1909 the RAC’s members blew a quarter of a million on their new gaff.

  By the turn of the century there were eighty-seven clubs in London, though, regrettably, none of the particularly silly ones set up shop in Pall Mall – the Ugly Club, the Wet Paper Club or the No Pay No Liquor Club, ‘whose members were obliged to wear a hat of peculiar construction’. But maybe they should have, because as the jazz age dawned the Pall Mall clubs were already losing their appeal to the young. Up West there were cinemas, cocktails, dancing and – yes – women.

  In the thirties the idle rich were a dying breed; Bertie Wooster’s comic appeal depended on the anachronisms of his lifestyle. Everyone had to work, even some of the aristos, and after a hard day you didn’t want to unwind in a room of old men snoring into their port. Of the twenty clubs based in Pall Mall before the war, only seven remain. The Marlborough closed in 1953: ‘Costs rose, members died, and none came to take their place,’ an ex-member explained succinctly.

  Such a fate would seem to await the Army & Navy Club, judging from the hunched figures in brogues and felt hats I watched holding on to each other as they tottered in, but the braided doormen outside the RAC were ushering in a very different breed of member. Seeing yet another Japanese businessman and his immaculately cashmered wife being wafted inside I wondered what it was about crusty British institutions – Burberry, Aquascutum, single malt whisky, Bentleys, brutal imperialism – that so excites this distant nation.

  ‘We’re doin’ all right,’ mumbled the largest doorman, jowls chafing across his vast epaulettes as he scanned the reckless traffic for incoming taxis. ‘Think all the clubs are doin’ all right. All redecoratin’ and all that. We got 15,000 members.’

  ‘That’s only 5,000 less than in the thirties,’ I said, hoping to ingratiate myself and so sidle in for a quick peek at ‘the most beautiful swimming bath in Britain’ and whatever else £250,000 bought you in 1909. ‘Um, I don’t suppose I could . . .’ I said, flapping an arm vaguely towards the museum-like atrium where Burgess and Maclean met for their pre-flee tea.

  The doorman raised an elaborately cuffed hand, as much to silence me as to flag down the cab which now peeled off the race circuit and halted extravagantly in front of us. ‘Private,’ he muttered grimly into a small cloud of tyre smoke, despatching a bow-tied Oriental into the back seat.

  After being accorded a similar reception at the more intimately panelled (and studiously anonymous) doorways to the Reform and the Athenaeum, it occurred to me that this was the appeal of club membership: it allowed the nineteenth century back into the twenty-first, granting new money the haughty exclusivity of old. By turning away people they don’t like the look of, Pall Mall’s club doormen guarantee their members feel not just richer than you, but actually better. I could go into the Ritz in my anorak and provided I had the cash no one would turn me away, but here I was scum, a subspecies to be allowed a tantalising glimpse of dark marble and balustraded mezzanine over a burly uniformed shoulder before being brusquely banished. I suppose it should have bothered me – a Londoner humiliated on home soil before an audience of ponced-up foreigners with armfuls of Harrods bags – but the theatre was so preposterous I felt more inclined to laugh. Seeing a man wearing a bowler hat fulsomely decorated with salmon flies I actually did.

  Throughout the clubs’ heyday membership passes would have been superfluous: if you looked like a toff, you were a toff, and if you didn’t you had no recreational business being in Pall Mall at all. But by the end of the thirties, it was becoming more difficult to judge a Londoner by appearance alone: the strict ‘hat code’ which demarcated the classes – flat caps for the blue collars, trilbies for the middle market, bowlers and homburgs for City types and professionals – w
as breaking down, and developments in artificial fabrics were blurring the female fashion boundaries.

  And though a part of Pall Mall is trying very hard to re-erect those barriers, watching two black-glass Rollers with scantly charactered number plates idle outside Consolidated Real Estate Management Services I understood the street’s dominant theme is that rich people now have to spend more time earning money and so have less time to spend it.

  Though the gentlemen’s clubs still dominate the dark side of Pall Mall, the culling has been severe: turning back and gazing down the way I’d come I noted the stark sixties mid-rise office boxes that regularly jutted out and above the ornate club buildings, like house bricks dropped in a wedding cake. Sometimes the building survived, only to be stealthily invaded by new money. The gas-lit torches still stand proudly along its façade, but the United Service Club is now the Institute of Directors, full of flow-chart addicts nodding purposefully at each other while recharging their laptops where once they’d have been playing cricket with bread rolls and buttering the porter’s tie. ‘The IoD is a place of business,’ emphasised a heart-sinking notice in the reception.

  No one lives in Pall Mall now, but while snooping around trying to find out if they did I found myself rewardingly waylaid. Between the glass blocks and colonnaded clubs ran tiny, ancient alleys, home to places you might expect to find, such as milliners’ shops with bow-fronted Quality Street windows, but plenty you wouldn’t, like cafés with slashed foam benches and the sort of hardware shops that flog a four-pack of loo rolls for 99p. I can only assume that so perpetual is the redevelopment process that the area permanently supports a floating population of builders and tradesmen. Only later did I find a picture of one of those hardware shops dating from 1930, when it had been a second-hand dealer whose window-blind slogans stridently requested ‘office waste and rags – white & coloured’ and promised to pay ‘the best price for dripping and kitchen stuff’. Easily visible to Vic and Marge as they strolled down Pall Mall, one imagines this may have sealed the street’s fate as the purple-set runt, wedged rudely up against Jail.

  On Pall Mall itself, though, the surviving retail premises are appropriately faithful to the new-money-for-old club theme, latching on to a fashion amongst City parvenus to play at country gentlemen. Culturally obligated to indulge in more acceptable upper-class pursuits, the patrons of Pall Mall have turned to huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ in place of smokin’, gamblin’ and shaggin’. (The drinkin’ only survives in a corporate sense – the old wine merchants Berry Brothers have officers here, as do the Cutty Sark lot.) There were six gun and tackle shops in Pall Mall in the thirties and three remain, selling rods, rifles and publications whose titles benchvaulted joyously over the innuendo parapet: Just Black Labs, A Passion for Grouse, Monster Rods: A Hands-on Guide. Really – you couldn’t make it up (although in the case of the last one I did).

  I went into one of these places, a tackle shop whose absence of price tags eloquently identified its work-hard/play-hard (or rather earn-hard/spend-hard) customer base. After partially upsetting a small display of £120 trout-fishing sunglasses I approached the plummy and balding Prince Edward behind the counter and began asking him questions. Unaffected by their persistent crassness, the cheery confidence with which he replied to these suggested it wasn’t the first time he’d been asked what his most expensive rod was or if he stocked anything in solid gold, presumably by customers who had no intention of purchasing anything less.

  ‘We do a salmon rod for £2,500,’ he said, smiling proudly. ‘Top-quality graphite. Special order.’ No gold, I was told with a sympathetic tilt of the head, but if titanium was my thing they had a £1,500 reel.

  My gaze was wandering up to a wall-mounted display of J.R. Hartleyesque feathery hook things when the phone rang. Snatches of assured patter drifted over as I pondered that I might never again have this opportunity: to fix a man in the eye and demand, ‘Right – whip those flies down and let’s have a good look at your tackle.’

  ‘Yuh . . . stunning little rod. Smashing. Put it like this – we sold one to Eric Clapton last week.’

  I imagined the proud endorsement emblazoned across a Fender Stratocaster in a music-shop window: ‘As played by Captain Birdseye.’ Then, unwilling to distract the assistant from what was clearly a lucrative call, I wandered out and up the regal pavements. This was the sunny side of the street, and with the stupidly snooty clubs hidden in shadow I began to feel warmed by Pall Mall’s aura of timeless nobility. So much so, in fact, that I made rather an arse of myself after strutting pompously up to a shop assistant as he lugged the last of his establishment’s stock – curtain rings, knobs, brackets and other items of what you might call brassmongery – into a removal van.

  ‘Ah! The end of an era,’ I sighed dramatically, as if speaking on behalf of the countless generations of Moores whose fancy peg and hook requirements had been taken care of by his establishment’s craftsmen.

  ‘I guess so,’ he said, stooping to shoulder a plastic bin full of door handles as I riffled importantly through my 1933 directory. ‘Though that era only started in, er . . .’ – and here he considered briefly – ‘. . . in 1998.’

  Yet my spirits were still up, and surveying the gloriously ornate stucco façades around me I recrossed Pall Mall with a dandy’s spring in my step, before clicking showily down a grand flight of stairs into St James’s Park. There, in wincing sun, I despatched my packed lunch amidst geese, secretaries and distant Big Ben bongs in happy anticipation: this was good, but as I set off back to the Rothmans end, I knew I’d saved the best for last. Casting your gaze upon the threshold plaques identifying it as the shared headquarters of Norwich Union and the National Neighbourhood Watch Association, upon those tea ladies carrying boardroom refreshments into its lifts, you’d hardly guess that all of Pall Mall’s most engagingly wayward excesses were embodied in Schomberg House. Not unless you noticed the nude Greeks propping the porch up.

  A red-brick pocket palace erected by William III for the eponymous Dutch mercenary who later copped it leading the English forces at the Battle of the Boyne, Schomberg House had to wait almost a hundred years for notoriety to come knocking in the form of Dr James Graham, who in 1781 lured London’s jaded thrill seekers to what he had irresistibly rechristened ‘The Temple of Health and Hymen’.

  If walls really did have ears, those of Schomberg House would have blushed themselves crimson many centuries ago. Part quackshow, part peepshow, the maverick Scottish physician’s therapeutic regime included sessions involving obscure ‘medico-electrical apparatus’ and a demonstration of the benefits of mud baths featuring the future Emma Hamilton (she of naughty-Nelson fame) stripped to the waist and wearing a feather headdress. Presiding over events in a ‘Celestial Throne’, Graham delivered lectures on infertility, and more particularly how this malaise could be overcome by slipping him fifty quid for a night in his ‘Grand Celestial State Bed’. On coloured sheets and serenaded by music (presumably, given Graham’s voyeuristic background presence, fervently accompanied by the fabled sound of one hand clapping), couples were guaranteed to conceive here ‘as even the barren must do when so powerfully agitated in the delights of love’.

  As would the thirties, so the late eighteenth century offered favoured sanctuary to purveyors of offbeam medicine: Graham didn’t get any grief from the authorities until he allowed illegal card games to be played in an adjoining room, and even then he was let off. Only when he began referring to himself as ‘Servant of the Lord OWL’ did clients begin to doubt his competence, doubts only partly allayed when he explained that ‘owl’ stood for ‘Oh! Wonderful Love’.

  After the fucking, the shopping. Graham was in an asylum by the time Dyde & Scribe converted Schomberg House into an upmarket haberdashery, and dead when in 1796 it evolved into what was Europe’s first department store. With separate sections for fabrics, jewellery, clocks and fashion, Harding, Howell & Co. advertised itself widely in the press as stocking ‘every article of for
eign manufacture which there is any possibility of obtaining’.

  Ever Pall Mall’s bellwether, in the mid-nineteenth century Schomberg House gave itself a firm slap in the face and settled into institutional sobriety. The War Office moved in, along with a few residual royals: my 1933 directory lists two of the tenants as Helena HH Princess, GBE, CI and the similarly ennobled Marie-Louise, old-maid granddaughters of Queen Victoria. Internally overhauled for office use in the fifties, it has been hosting dull annual general meetings ever since – though having said that, I’d love to have seen Dr Graham grab the wrong end of the stick in two eager hands when he read that bell-plate and saw that peeping Toms were no longer merely tolerated, but apparently encouraged by a national association.