by Lucy Inglis
We now leave behind the artists, artisans, soldiers, the English whores and French goldsmiths, the shoppers and travellers and head across Regent Street into Mayfair, London’s ghetto of the ‘higher classes’.
6. Mayfair
Mayfair takes its name from The May Fair which moved here from Haymarket in 1686–8, occupying the space now covered by Shepherd Market and Curzon Street. The Haymarket was exactly that, dealing in tons of hay and straw for London’s many thousands of horses. Shepherd Market was named for the owner of the land, rather than any idyllic meeting of shepherds and their flocks, but the area remained rural. In the reign of George I, the May Fair was banned as a public scandal, and soon after that it was history. Instead, Mayfair was becoming dominated by the mansions on the north side of Piccadilly. Behind them, it was still mostly empty fields up to Oxford Street. This was the scene of some of the fastest growth in Georgian London; by the mid-eighteenth century, it was almost entirely built up, with grand townhouses and leafy private squares for the aristocracy and the fashionable set.
What had started in St James’s Fields quickly moved north of Piccadilly, the dividing line between Mayfair and St James’s. Mayfair residents were in town to play and to shop. Renting houses and apartments suited them well. Leases ranged from part of a single season to decades, depending upon the inclinations and pockets of both parties. Mayfair comprises seven major estates named mainly after the owners who developed them: Burlington, Millfield, Conduit Mead, Albemarle, Berkeley, Curzon and, of course, Grosvenor. The Grosvenor estate is the only one which remains in family hands today without having undergone major dissipation.
The building of these estates was sporadic and relied upon periods of boom, but the trade cycle of the century was frequently interrupted by war. The Treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, coupled with the arrival of George I on the throne created a sense of stability. This, in turn, encouraged a wave of building which would establish the West End. The rapid bricking over of Mayfair’s greenery caused consternation amongst her more vocal intellectuals: ‘All the Way through this new Scene I saw the World full of Bricklayers and Labourers; who seem to have little else to do, but like Gardeners, to dig a Hole, put in a few Bricks, and presently there goes up a House.’
Mayfair, showing the main squares, detail from John Greenwood’s map, 1827
Mayfair was where a new breed of aristocrats emerged, buoyed by increasing wealth, obsessed by taste and reputation. They built some of London’s most spectacular houses and most beautiful garden squares. They cultivated art and refinement in a new way, creating eighteenth-century English style as we know it.
BURLINGTON HOUSE, PICCADILLY: A ‘MAN OF TASTE’
From 1660, mansions such as Clarendon House and Burlington House began to spring up on the north side of Piccadilly, but they were red-brick country houses and soon fell out of fashion. The next generation rebuilt them, but few men would so prominently yet unobtrusively influence London’s architecture as Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington. Like William Beckford, he inherited his father’s title at the age of ten. That was in 1704. When he reached his teens, Richard began to travel to the Continent on a series of grand tours. The ‘grand tour’ had evolved from a drunken tour of the Low Countries, to take in the cultural seat of Europe: Italy. Burlington adored Italy. He began to collect on a grand scale – and not just things, but also people. On a trip during his twenty-first year, he returned with a sculptor, a violinist, a cellist and some domestic artisans, as well as 878 crates of works of art, and two Parisian harpsichords.
Burlington loved, in particular, the works of Venetian architect Andrea Palladio and his Classical and severe style of building. In 1715, Scottish architect Colen Campbell published the first volume of his Vitruvius Britannicus. It was a catalogue of designs, including works by Jones and Wren. In the same year, Richard Boyle turned twenty-one and appointed Campbell as the architect of Burlington House, which was to be rebuilt and modernized. Burlington was by now a cultured and intelligent young man with a love for all things Italian, including music. In 1719, he was one of the original contributors to the Royal Academy of Music; that summer, he conducted a lively correspondence, in French, with Handel on the subject of baroque opera. Burlington had found his feet as a patron of the arts.
Burlington House gate, engraving from William Hogarth’s The Man of Taste, 1731. Alexander Pope stands on the scaffolding splashing paint on to the coach of the Duke of Chandos as Lord Burlington carries a plasterer’s float up the ladder
When complete, Burlington House was a triumph. Horace Walpole described it as ‘one of those edifices in fairy-tales that are raised by genii in a night’s time’. The house was an inspiration for the aristocrats who visited it, and many sought to emulate it. Burlington continued as a gentleman-architect, designing assembly rooms, houses for his friends, and even a dormitory at Westminster School. Palladian motifs – such as the Classical pediments above the porches, and the rusticated quoins on the corners of buildings – were soon seen all over London. They featured in books for gentleman-architects, and then in trade manuals for builders and carpenters. The ubiquity of the Palladian style in British architecture is clearly seen in the doorways and windows of most of the Edwardian office buildings along Piccadilly still standing today, testifying silently to Pope’s backhanded swipe at Burlington, whose simple but elegant building formulae had filled ‘half the land with imitating fools’.
‘THE HEIRESS OF A SCRIVENER’: THE GROSVENOR ESTATE
The fields between Park Lane and Oxford Street came to the Grosvenor family in 1677, through the marriage of 21-year-old Cheshire baronet Sir Thomas Grosvenor to twelve-year-old Mary Davies. Mary was the ‘heiress of a scrivener in the City of London’ and holder of the Manor of Ebury, upon which most of Mayfair, Belgravia and Pimlico now sit. She, her mother and a not-quite-rich-enough-step-father were encumbered by the estate, which was deeply in debt. A fortuitous marriage was the only way out. The Grosvenors had money and a name but were small beer in terms of nobility. Mary had property but neither money nor breeding. The marriage produced two daughters and five sons before her husband’s death, aged forty-four.
The day before her husband was buried, Mary introduced her family to Father Lodowick Fenwick, a Catholic chaplain. By September, Mary was planning a trip to Paris with various members of the Fenwick faction, including Edward, Father Fenwick’s brother. What took place there became known within the family as ‘The Tragedy’. On returning to London, Mary drew up a petition to Queen Anne alleging that Edward Fenwick and his brother, the chaplain, had lured her to a Paris hotel and drugged her ‘with a great quantity of opium and other intoxicating things’. Then, whilst drugged, she had been married to Edward. For the Grosvenor family, their children and myriad dependents, this was a disastrous turn of events. They sent agents to France, scouring for witnesses. Mary was declared a lunatic, probably to strengthen the case, and the marriage was finally annulled. She died in 1730; by 1733, her youngest surviving son, Robert, was the only heir. Two of his brothers had died in infancy, and the other two had inherited the title before dying.
Robert’s plans for the estate were grand. Grosvenor Square is the largest of all the Mayfair squares, and Colen Campbell was brought in to create a design for the east side. All the plots were taken by the builder John Simmons, who had a respectable stab at creating London’s first palace-front, a grand terrace of houses which looks like one enormous building. However, in 1734, the architecture critic James Ralph slammed it, even going so far as to call Number 19 ‘a wretched attempt at something extraordinary’.
Still, there was no shortage of takers. The wretched Number 19 was soon inhabited by the 7th Earl of Thanet, who parted with £7,500 for it (the equivalent of about £11 million now). Like most of the finest houses in the square, it was demolished in the twentieth century. The nine-year-old Mozart performed there, in 1764. And in the same year, the Adam brothers began to make improvements to the house. They were busy all over the sq
uare for years, providing work for a veritable army of builders and craftsmen. Most of the houses were built with mews behind, containing smaller houses for servants, as well as stabling and storage.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, Grosvenor, nearby Berkeley Square and the surrounding streets were fully inhabited. Of the first 277 houses built on the estate, 117 (or just over 42 per cent) were occupied by titled families. There was also a large ‘support staff’ taking up residence. In Brook Street there was an apothecary and a shoemaker, as well as a grocer, a cheesemonger and a tailor. In 1749, almost 76 per cent of the Mayfair voters in the Westminster election were tradesmen; they included builders, caterers, dressmakers, two peruke-makers and a stay-maker. At the same time, there were 75 public houses, inns and places to eat. By the last decade of the century, almost two-thirds of the 1,526 residents were involved in ‘trade’ – ranging from muffin-makers to dressmakers to a gentleman-architect – and all were dependent upon the voracious consumers amongst the aristocracy who, by the 1790s, dominated the area.
Boyle’s court guide was first published in 1792, a hybrid of an A–Z and Hello! magazine, showing the London visitor which were the fashionable streets and where the serious players lived. Upper Brook Street was almost entirely dominated by the elite of the court circle, with 49 out of a possible 55 houses listed in the guide. The listings followed a strict sense of hierarchy, almost an aristocratic caste system.
The magnates, or grandees, were at the very top, roughly 400 peers and peeresses who owned on average 14,000 acres each; below them were the great landowners at about 3,000 acres, and at the bottom were the country squires with at least 1,000 acres each. During the eighteenth century, many men rose to tremendous wealth through business. They tended to buy houses and country estates, yet often disposed of them during their own lifetimes when a better investment came along. For the aristocracy, holding on to a family seat for three generations or more conferred gentility, and a country seat gave a sense of permanence reflecting family standing. London, in contrast, was a hubbub of unknown potential and danger, artistry and fakery. The things the aristocracy stood for – culture, politics, gambling, scandalous sex lives and flashy wealth – were best suited to the urban landscape. The London Season, revolving partly around the sessions of Parliament, which ran from November until the summer recess, was also a whirl of shopping, visits, parties, exhibitions and recitals. For the two-thirds of Mayfair residents involved in servicing this four-month party, September must have been bittersweet.
As Mayfair became an increasingly covetable address during the eighteenth century, the success of the original speculation, and speculators, was assured. Yet all was not well within the Grosvenor family. Upon Robert’s death, his son Richard inherited. He was not a stupid man, but he had inherited little of his father’s good sense, and it wasn’t long before he began to gamble seriously. Gambling, however, was not to be the sum of his problems. In 1765, he found his wife, Henrietta, in flagrante delicto with Henry, Duke of Cumberland. Richard was thirty-eight, whilst the lovers were both twenty-four. He sued the Duke for ‘criminal conversation’, or adultery. It must have been pride which made the wealthy and handsome Grosvenor sue; he could not obtain a divorce, as Henrietta could prove him guilty of cheating too. Richard won and was awarded damages of £10,000. He and Henrietta separated in the high-profile case, leaving him free to continue as one of the ‘most profligate men, of his age, in what relates to women’ and a ‘dupe to the turf’.
In 1785, Richard was forced to hand over the estate to trustees, who administered it in order to pay his oceanic debts. He died, in 1802, from complications of surgery, with debts of £150,000 (about £120 million now). It was a sum only achievable by a man with an overweening love of horse racing and the gaming tables. Fortunately, the vast holdings of the Grosvenor estate had remained untouched, although cash was seriously depleted. By the 1820s, all the 99-year leases granted by Robert had begun to expire and his grandson, also Robert, began to consolidate an empire.
LORD CHESTERFIELD: MAYFAIR’S MAN OF LETTERS
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773), laid out a set of rules for aristocratic men to live by. Chesterfield House sat on the corner of Curzon Street, south of the sprawling Grosvenor Square development. There the Earl wrote Georgian London’s most celebrated series of letters. They were aimed at one target: his illegitimate son, also Philip, born in March 1732 to Elizabeth de Bouchet, a French governess. In 1733, Chesterfield had married the illegitimate daughter of George I and the Duchess of Kendal, Petronilla Melusine von der Schulenberg. She was his next-door neighbour and, at forty-one, a year older than him. He maintained mistresses of varying social standing, and Petronilla contented herself with taking an active interest in her stepson’s welfare. Chesterfield could not afford to be too fussy: his stock may have been noble but he was very short, with a large head and bad teeth. ‘I have wished myself taller a thousand times, but to no purpose, for all the Stanhopes are but a size above dwarfs.’ He was painfully aware of the importance of appearance and tried to impress this upon his son in his 448 letters, which were often harsh and insensitive. There was hardly an aspect of Philip’s life he did not seek to either dominate or invade.
Philip was a straightforward and gentle boy. Chesterfield sent him on a grand tour, and his instructions by letter become increasingly precise as the distance between them increased. He saw the grand tour as Philip’s ‘apprenticeship’, which must be served diligently in order to become a gentleman. Philip should get to grips with language and the fundamentals of a ‘proper’ education.
Poor, good-natured Philip tried to please and wrote chatty letters back, including observations upon the English abroad in eighteenth-century Turin, to which his father replied: ‘Who they are, I do not know; but I well know the general ill conduct, the indecent behavior, and the illiberal views of my young countrymen abroad; especially wherever they are in numbers together.’
Chesterfield’s preoccupation with appearance continued, and he fretted:
Mr. Tollot says, that you are inclined to be fat, but I hope you will decline it as much as you can; not by taking anything corrosive to make you lean, but by taking as little as you can of those things that would make you fat. Drink no chocolate; take your coffee without cream … It is a real inconvenience to anybody to be fat, and besides it is ungraceful for a young fellow.
All such advice is accompanied with the balm of ‘dear boy’ and ‘dear friend’ but quite how far that removed the sting is hard to tell. Yet Chesterfield wasn’t a humourless man. He was often funny and expressive in his correspondence, but his ideas of life and conduct were fixed and finely detailed.
It seems unlikely that Philip was dedicated enough to spend his time at the bottom of the garden reading the great poets. He was no star, but he pottered along with a career facilitated largely by his father’s influence. In 1768, he died at the age of thirty-six, at which point Chesterfield was shocked to discover that his only son, himself illegitimate, had been married to the natural daughter of an Irish gentleman for a decade and had two sons of his own. Perhaps he had simply been too frightened of his father to tell him about his wife. Philip’s death caused a decline in his father, and Chesterfield wrote, ‘I feel a gradual decay … and I think that I shall not tumble, but slide gently to the bottom of the hill of life.’ He was right; it took eight years for him to reach the bottom of the hill, at Chesterfield House, on 24 March 1773. He left money to his servants, whom he described in his will as ‘equals by Nature, and my inferiors only by the difference of our fortunes’. Chesterfield’s letters to his son reveal the tiny incidences, pressures and expectations of upper-class life in Georgian London, and really do seem to have been written from the heart.
BERKELEY: SQUARE OF EMPIRES
Around the edges of the Grosvenor estate, other aristocrats were building. The buildings are less regular, and so were their occupants. In 1696, the 3rd Lord Berkeley sold Berkeley House to t
he 1st Duke of Devonshire. Devonshire didn’t want the house’s view to the north compromised, and the open space left for this purpose in the end became Berkeley Square.
The east side’s most famous resident was Horace Walpole, who occupied Number 11 for the last fifteen years of his life. There he wrote many of his famous letters, full of ‘lively descriptions of those public events whose nicer details, without such a chronicler, would be altogether hid under the varnish of what we call history’. The site of his home is now covered with car showrooms and offices.
Commercial buildings also cover Domenico Negri’s ice cream parlour, which would go on to become the legendary Regency cake shop Gunter’s. In 1757, Negri established himself as a confectioner at the Pineapple, in Numbers 7 and 8 Berkeley Square. His elaborate trade card proclaims him as making
… all Sorts of English, French and Italian wet and dry Sweet Meats, Cedrati and Bergamot Chips, Naples Diavolini and Diavoloni. All sorts of Biskets and Cakes, fine and Common, Sugar Plums, Syrup of Capilaire, Orgeate and Marsh Mallow, Ghimauve or Lozenges for Colds & Cough, all Sorts of Ice, Fruits and Creams in the best Italian manner, Likewise furnishes Entertainments in Fashions, Sells All sorts of Deserts & Glass work at the Lowest Price.
Two of Negri’s apprentices went on to publish successful recipe books of their own. Frederick Nutt’s The Complete Confectioner contains recipes for ice creams which are now served up as modern and innovative, such as almond and parmesan. Ice cream was made in a pewter sabotiere, or ‘freezing pot’, which was packed into a wooden tub of ice. A wooden paddle or spade was then used to pull the freezing crystals away from the sides, churning the mixture to keep it smooth. Negri’s also served brown bread, elderflower and pistachio ice creams. All flavours we assume to be ‘modern’.
