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.
