A meditation on Mayfair

The inscrutable facade of the old American Embassy on Grosvenor Square is finally crumbling. For 70 years its aquiline presence has dominated the square, turning its clean parterres and marbled spaces into a testament to the transatlantic values of the Enlightenment. Now the armoured windows are being removed like teeth, and the building’s cadaverous interior pierced by sunlight. From offices on neighbouring Grosvenor St, the building’s landlord looks on in quiet satisfaction, the Duke of Westminster, whose family refused to sell the land unless its pre-revolutionary holdings in the US were returned. As these amounted to the greater part of the City of Miami, it was a claim designed to fail. Yet it serves as a vignette for Mayfair, where the rock-pools of aristocracy fill themselves in the passing tides of international capital.

Mayfair’s two syllables are heavily freighted with associations; sybaritic and discreet, it is still the apogee of the Monopoly board. These fast associations were originally a quirk of London geography. It is bordered to the north by Oxford St, where Thomas de Quincy used to buy his opium; and to the south by Piccadilly, with its flower girls and ‘Dilly boys. Beyond Piccadilly is the clubland of St James, where country landowners came to shop and sleep, safe from rich food or intellectual conversation. Exerting its temptations on them was the area of the neighbouring May Fair, an annual spring festival synonymous with vice. It was moved away from the area in the mid-Seventeenth century on account of “riotous and disorderly behaviour”. Yet the imprimatur of its pleasure economy remains to the present day.

Only last year, a titan of the corporate world was removed for using a company credit card in one of the purple-lit doorways giving onto Shepherd Market. Had he opted for the more traditional cobbled environs of Market Mews, his career might have survived. It was there that a certain nobleman was said to have expired in the arms of his physical confessor. Knowing the patterns of his life, she picked up the phone to his club to impart the news. Her fellow hospitality professionals swiftly repatriated his body south of Piccadilly, where it was rediscovered in calm repose; swaddled by his favourite armchair in the Club library. Ah, people said on hearing the news: his Grace died happy.

One man credits himself with chasing Shepherd Market’s oldest trade indoors: Huseyin Ozer, founder of the Sofra restaurant chain. He arrived in the area in the late Eighties with a small loan and his eye on the corner location which remains his flagship. Yet the spot was also favoured by the area’s more long-standing professionals. His solution was to install Sofra’s trademark hanging flower baskets. By means of persistent overwatering, the pavements beneath were rendered useless to an activity reliant on make-up and careful presentation. “I was spending half my takings on flowers each month,” he says. “But it worked!” Such lateral thinking eventually won Huseyin thirty restaurants around Europe and a trademark black Lamborghini. His ambition is to have a corner cafe in heaven – but cannot be drawn on whether it will require the same founding techniques as Sofra Mayfair.

The area’s fulcrum is Berkeley Square. Its sloping geography, dense canopy and Georgian town houses present as a raffish cousin to the calm rationalism of Grosvenor Square. Traffic sluices around its broad corners in an echo of the postprandial racing laps performed by the Bentley Boys in the Twenties. Their twin homes were the Jack Barclay dealership and Morton’s Club. Both are still there; the first performing its original function and the second revived in a wan pastiche of its former self. The “Berkeley-Square lap” entered sufficiently into motoring mythology to be used by Ford for an advertising campaign in the Eighties.

Across the square lies the place which most epitomised Mayfair’s international cachet. Founded by Mark Birley in 1963, Annabel’s Club was the sine-qua-non of fast living for nearly fifty years. “We got married in Castel’s,” reminisces on Mayfair regular, referring to Paris’s premium fleshpot. “But we met in Annabel’s.” The champagne was served in wine glasses to reduce trips to the bar. The starlit corner dance-floor perfectly curated towards the needs of a certain type of gentleman and his younger partner.

The floors above contained London’s most notorious casino, the Clermont Club; where scions of the aristocracy gambled away their patrimonies as tigers from the owner’s zoo strolled past. It is said that Sir David Stirling – co-founder of the Special Air Service – survived Rommel but was not so lucky at the Clermont Club. The eponymous Mayfair Set has since given its name to a documentary series about the period. Although snide and deterministic, its access to archive footage of Mayfair is compelling. If Annabel’s first history was shot through with tragedy – the Mayfair set left suicide and murder in its wake, as well as destitution – it has now been reborn as farce. Since its sale last decade, Annabel’s has been relaunched as a supercharged parody; a surreal, multi-story world complete with bouncers dressed as Tweedledum. Like Morton’s and a slew of other pretenders, its mission is rendered useless by the presence in Shepherd Market of Annabel’s true progeny: 5 Hertford St, opened by Robin Birley in 2012, whose massive social gravity is now felt across world.

Yet Mayfair’s many resident imitators will be able to trade happily on its name until the Apocalypse and beyond. The building crane has provided a hardy breed during these years of apparent political uncertainty, with entire blocks being rebuilt from the ground up. For an area with Mayfair’s centuries of bankability, Brexit is just another passing season.