Cammin’ over ‘ere – Takin’ our Mansions!
Mayfair – a cosseted corner of England preserved in Edwardian amber, national exposure to which is guaranteed to bring out the worst inverted snobbery and chip-on-the-shoulder socialism of anyone from a working-class background. Who cares about these spoiled, snooty London gits detached from the ‘real world’? Come the revolution, they’ll be the first up against the wall, yeah? It’s a primordial gut reaction that needs to be nipped in the bud because Mayfair is actually not just a precious legacy of the old London, when Islington was a spa village and Chelsea was rural farmland; it’s also an increasingly rare pocket of qualities and characteristics that most of us imagine only live on in the imaginary Neverland of Ambridge, somehow surviving into the modern age and remaining largely impervious to the encroachment of the homogenous uniformity that has stripped most towns and cities in the country of their character; it’s a classy, less nihilistic incarnation of Royston Vasey, and BBC2’s ‘Modern Times’ series profiled the place and its people last weekend.
There are a fair share of camp chaps, middle-aged ladies who ‘know Camilla’ and estate agents who sell entire streets; but there are cockney geezers too – cabbies and blokes who like to start the day with a fry-up. There’s social housing in the shape of the Peabody estate, owned by the Peabody Trust, a housing association with a long and admirable history of providing rented accommodation for those unable to buy in the capital; in this day and age of ‘social cleansing’, their presence is more invaluable than ever. Many of Mayfair’s residents weren’t ‘to the manor born’ and came from relatively humble backgrounds; those that speak with immaculate RP probably took elocution lessons in the way that everyone who wanted to better themselves did before the 1960s; in a country whose oral insignia is increasingly characterised either by the ubiquitous monotony of mockney Estuary English or the tediously matey ‘northern’ accent, it’s refreshing to find this way of speaking still exists. But Mayfair is a hotbed of aspects of British life one almost expects to have died out with Ealing comedies
The curiously named Manthe Penton Harrap looks like Paloma Faith and speaks like the Queen launching a ship in 1957; she admitted being a resident of Mayfair gives her the opportunity to express her eccentricities without being bothered by the conservative mindset prevalent in the places most of us inhabit; she has a parrot perched on her shoulder and dresses in the manner of a Parisian courtesan from the La Belle Époque era. She’s delightful in an entertainingly frivolous fashion, a harmless character who has found her place in the world by creating her own world. Yes, these residents are wealthy by the standards of me and thee, but in comparison to their unseen and anonymous new neighbours-in-affluence, they may as well be marching from Jarrow.
Mayfair began to take shape as an exclusive neighbourhood in the mid-eighteenth century, with many of the great aristocratic Whig families building grandiose Palladian town residences such as the late, lamented Devonshire House; its less-than-refined origins, when the dregs of London would congregate for the annual May Fair (hence the name), were gradually erased, though the close proximity of the Tyburn gallows continued to attract an undesirable swarm of riff-raff to the vicinity. Public hangings were the sporting occasions of their day; had television existed at the time, Sky and the BBC would have been fighting over the live TV rights; but such archaic occasions were not favoured by Mayfair’s new residents and hangings eventually relocated to Newgate prison.
The aristocrats of the Georgian era were rich in ways that the aristocrats of today can only dream of; their nearest equivalents now would be Arab Sheiks or Russian Oligarchs; and this is why Mayfair is under threat as it slowly comes full circle. Great swathes of the neighbourhood have been bought up by shady, mysterious billionaires who don’t attend the local summer party the community holds for its residents; they remain hidden behind the walls of their mansion blocks and don’t mix and mingle; they are the urban equivalents of those who own holiday homes in Devon or Cornwall that remain empty for most months of the year. Their presence, however, is in danger of turning Mayfair into the same enclosed citadel that Chelsea has already become. Just as the nobility took over Mayfair two-hundred-and odd years ago and edged out the original inhabitants, the foreign invaders are doing likewise where many of those profiled in the BBC 2 documentary are concerned.
A telling scene in which a doctor met with a patient whose pixellated features preserved her safety spoke volumes as to the changing nature of Mayfair; she was an Indian girl, employed as a servant by one of the new residents, worked like a dog and unable to walk out on account of her employees holding onto her passport. It seems the newcomers to the neighbourhood have learnt the lessons of how to manage domestic staff from their aristocratic English forebears. Perhaps the fact that many emanate from former British colonies and the inherited memory of how their colonial masters treated their servants has lingered is a factor. It was a sober moment of a largely light-hearted programme, but nevertheless emphasised another unpleasant element of the change in the neighbourhood’s character.
This quaint, elegant enclave of cigar shops, cobblers, tailors, umbrella-makers, 30s-style coffee-shops and old-fashioned individual bespoke businesses catering for specialist tastes is bordering on extinction. The rents are rocketing and those who have given this antiquated bubble its unique identity are being forced to move out. They don’t make the requisite amount of money to justify their existence in a brand-led world of conglomerate commerce, and as one centuries-old family business after another shuts up shop, a Prêt-a-Manger or Chanel moves in, making Mayfair indistinguishable from other areas of central London.
But why should we shed a tear, right? It’s not as if these evicted tradesmen are being forced down to the local food bank, is it? It’s not as if they’re being forced to sign-on and shoplift. One of them left Burlington Arcade after thirty years and relocated to…Savile Row! Well, it depends if life has a purpose beyond that of a mirror endlessly reflecting our collective misery. We can’t save the ‘luxury’ of a library or an art gallery from closure when a hospital is understaffed or a school is falling apart at the seams (Funny how that is always the choice libraries and galleries are confronted by). Do we want the whole of the country to be an identikit parade of chain stores and glass malls at one end and an austerity row of pawnbrokers and pound shops at the other? As someone who has resided on the breadline, I know the thought that life had more to offer, and that somewhere in England there lurked a genuine community of eccentric oddballs whose quirks were viewed as a plus rather than a minus, was a great spur to try to improve my dismal lot.
Yes, it’s a hard sell, imploring people who have never been, and will never be, lucky enough to live in Mayfair to care what happens to it; but if current trends continue, the fate of Mayfair could be viewed as a microcosm of the country’s willingness to bend over and allow Mr Corporation to have his wicked way without putting up a fight. Anyone who wants at least a few isolated areas of Britain to cling onto their distinctive, non-corporate and defiantly insular traditions should care. And to rush to negative judgement regarding Mayfair’s long-term residents simply because they are considerably richer than us and speak like they’re at a Buckingham Palace garden party is as unfair a generalisation as believing everyone who lives on a council estate is a crack-addled benefits cheat.
Petunia Winegum
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February 20, 2015 at 10:06 am -
Historically they were all just tenants, rich or poor, but things might have been a-changing in a fundamental way.
2002:
The estate still owns the freeholds of most of its Mayfair and Belgravia properties, despite legislation passed in 1993 giving residents of blocks of flats the right to buy their freeholds. The Duke of Westminster resigned from the Conservative Party over this law change. To date, Grosvenor has sold only 185 freeholds, although it says its approach to requests to enfranchise has changed. “We just get on with it,” says a spokesman.
http://www.standard.co.uk/home/who-owns-london-6308427.html -
February 20, 2015 at 10:29 am -
Fact 1: London IS the greatest city on Earth (not Lutetia as Asterix would have us believe).
Fact 2: London isn’t actually a city but a collection of rivaling villages united in the struggle for On Street parking.
Fact 3: Mayfair and Park Lane are only worth holding if one also has the ‘greens’ (among Monoployistas known as the ‘Princes Defence Strategy’).
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February 20, 2015 at 11:12 am -
Fact3a
Accrue enough wealth to build a couple of hotels on them though, and all you had to do was sit…. and wait until you bankrupted the victims… one at a time… -
February 20, 2015 at 8:51 pm -
The green set (Regent Street, Oxford Street, and Bond Street) are the worst value of the eight sets in Monopoly. Hard to acquire, expensive to develop, but not commanding commensurate rents. Mayfair and Park Lane are better value. Three houses on the orange set (Bow Street, Marlborough Street, and Vine Street, with rents of £550/£550/£600) is the affordable threshold development that can be decisive in a game. The orange set has the added advantage of trapping a good proportion of those coming out of Jail. Also handy for the Opera!
Light blues are almost as good value.
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February 20, 2015 at 11:13 pm -
It is a truism that whoever get the oranges wins…if not always then a lot….although any game with an element of chance will never be totally predictable.
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February 21, 2015 at 10:14 am -
I was always fond of getting hold of Whitechapel and the Old Kent Road and unleashing a late Sixties-style building boom, whilst rubbing my hands and making politically incorrect remarks about how many Pakistani’s I was going to cram into my houses.
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February 20, 2015 at 10:49 am -
You’re right about the futility of trying to get folk to care about Mayfair – some of us don’t care what happens anywhere within the M25, it’s all a foreign land to the real Brits, increasingly remote, increasingly foreign, increasingly irrelevant to real life.
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February 20, 2015 at 11:45 am -
Some years ago, when Global Warming was still new and fashionable, it was under discussion in the Design Office. According to one newspaper article I’d read, it could result in vineyards in Northumberland and the flooding of London. My mate looked at me with a slightly puzzled expression. “OK. So apart from eight million asylum-seeking cockneys, where’s the downside?”
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February 20, 2015 at 11:58 am -
First they displaced the poor, then the working class, then the Middle class and then they came for you.
Long live Global Capitalism-
February 20, 2015 at 1:10 pm -
Sooner it arrives in Barrow-in-Furness the better…
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February 20, 2015 at 1:13 pm -
Barrow-in-Furness? Even Global Capitalism has to draw a line somewhere….
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February 20, 2015 at 1:11 pm
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February 20, 2015 at 1:21 pm -
You mean the “real life” in places like Bradford, Dewsbury, Rotherham, Rochdale, Oldham, Birmingham, Peterborough? Places like that?
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February 20, 2015 at 2:12 pm -
”
You mean the “real life” in places like Bradford, Dewsbury, Rotherham, Rochdale, Oldham, Birmingham, Peterborough? Places like that?”Or as they are more properly known “the Provinces” or more simply “Geordie Land”(cos they are north of Watford Gap)
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February 20, 2015 at 2:16 pm -
I fear you may have missed his point,TBD. Observe the third one, for example.
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February 20, 2015 at 3:06 pm -
“I fear you may have missed his point,TBD. Observe the third one, for example.”
Rotheram? Some place in Geordie Land, if I recall aright, just left of the ‘Here Be Dragons’ symbol on my Cockney Book Of British Roads. A town where those not worrying whippets, molest vulnerable EDL-pin up girls? As far as I can tell from that list all the towns listed aren’t actually in Real Britain but in Purgatory betwixt Heaven (London) and Hull….mind you, Peterborough is sooo far east it is almost in The Swamplands of Offatananglia.
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February 20, 2015 at 4:33 pm -
My experience of Peterborough is restricted to 45 minutes freezing my arse off on a station platform. I would’ve welcomed the sight of a few prehistoric animals swimming by that night.
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February 20, 2015 at 5:57 pm -
Savilasaurus used to be a common sight apparently.
Peterborough residents have been sharing their memories of when the DJ and charity fundraiser lived in the city. Jimmy used to work as a consultant for travel agent Thomas Cook and helped city charities raise thousands of pounds. Nigel Hards, now the chairman of Peterborough and Stamford Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, worked with Jimmy in the early 1990s at Thomas Cook. He said: “I worked with him quite closely for about four years. “He was a very complex character. The person on the TV screen and on the radio was a very different person to the private Jimmy Savile. “He did lots of things for lots of people that he would not talk about, as well as his publicised charity work.
“He was a great ambassador for Peterborough. He helped launch the Charity Six road race, and lots of top runners, including Steve Ovett and Steve Cram came along, just because he was involved. “He was heavily involved in helping set up a children’s medical health charity in the city, by raising a quarter of a million pounds. “He was also instrumental in bringing Princess Diana to the city as part of Thomas Cook’s 150th anniversary. “He was also a very intelligent man and was a member of MENSA.
“I once asked him what he did at Stoke Mandeville Hospital as a volunteer. “He said he liked working the night shift at the mortuary, because he thought it would be easier for loved ones if he was there when they came in. “He also said it was the only place in the hospital where he could smoke his cigars, as the inmates didn’t complain. “There will never be anyone like him again and he will be missed. It is a sad day.”
http://jimcannotfixthis.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/posh-innocence.html
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February 20, 2015 at 10:56 am -
As a callow graduate Celt, I remember pitching up at a letting office in Piccadilly in the 1970s in search of a room to rent in the vicinity. The incredibly stuck-up service person intoned, in fake RP: “Eeew. It’s a pity you’re not public school and Oxbridge. Sorry, we don’t have anything suitable.”
Years later, having made some money in the meantime, I decided to invest in a buy-to-let flat in Mayfair. As it happened, my budget was inadequate, but the estate agents kept recommending, in their strangled accent, that I should try a place called “Slane Squeh”. It took a while for the penny to drop, and in the end I bought elsewhere.
Conclusion: Mayfair has always been full of phonies. I shed no tears for its demise.
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February 20, 2015 at 10:59 am -
“everyone who lives on a council estate is a crack-addled benefits cheat.” “Parisian courtesan from the La Belle Époque era”
Until very recently the whole point of accruing wealth in England was that it allowed one to become an Eccentric. Something as vital to our nation interest and identity as the , now sadly deceased, ‘pub’ or having a ‘shed’. The more money one had, the tattier the carpet slippers, the obscener the acts performed on unsuspecting Scullery Maids or Stable Boys or both, the less time spent on the annual bath and the more time spent learning Elvish or writing treatises on the Royal Family being of the line of Judea (I kid you not).
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February 20, 2015 at 11:10 am -
Thank God such behaviour is a thing of the past…
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/02_04/EltonJohn1_468x350.jpg
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February 20, 2015 at 1:42 pm -
Does the Peabody Trust mentioned above have anything at all to do with the ‘International Peabody’ claim of Mark Williams-Thomson?
I’ve often wondered what being a ‘peabody’ – or ‘peabo’ for short – actually entails. That MWT engages as a peabo on an international scale suggests there may be an incredible level of cross-border co-operation between peabos. Perhaps the organisational structure resembles a ‘ring’?-
February 20, 2015 at 3:54 pm -
I have genuinely wondered that myself and have indeed searched for something that provided an explanation. It is trumpeted so blatantly that it must be something worthwhile I thought… I found nothing. That nobody seemed to have mentioned it, or indeed offered an explanation led me to conclude that maybe I was caught in some kind of Emperor’s New Clothes parallel and I would show my ignorance by mentioning it. Still not sure to be honest! lol
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February 20, 2015 at 5:06 pm -
Well, it can’t possibly be the single award dished out here to ‘ITV Studios and Hardcash Productions/Fuuse Films’ for two seperate ‘Exposure’ shows:
Anyone seeking to portray himself as an ‘International Peabody’ off the back of that would be little short of a fantasist! It must be something else…
It was a tweet of his that caught my eye, the mighty man’s opinion about a pretty bad looking film (I saw the trailer a couple of weeks back): Kingsman.
A cartoonish group of secret spies & international do-gooders, running around placing fig-leaves over statues’ willies or something… and he’d been to see it & thought the violence – particularly in a church – was just a little too strong. I wondered if his kids had dragged him to see it, or perhaps it was the other way around?
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February 20, 2015 at 5:36 pm
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February 20, 2015 at 1:46 pm -
I have to confess that I’ve only ever been to London twice in my life, and to be quite honest the place didn’t appeal to me. Far too big, permanent rush hour, and far, far too many people, most of whom (there was the occasional exception) were either somewhat rude or downright supercilious. Maybe things there have improved in the intervening twenty years….or maybe not; I don’t know, but what I read suggests it hasn’t.
That said, I do have a soft spot for the Great British Eccentric. The people who live their lives to suit themselves, without doing anything to harm others. The people who totally ignore fashion or the latest ‘celebrity’ craze (there were people quietly baking superlative cakes at home long before The Great British Bake-Off came on the goggle-box, and they will be long after it has faded into memory, too). Fortunately, there are still plenty of them about, and whilst you don’t always notice them because they are seldom attention-seekers, they are busy all over the country running donkey sanctuaries, restoring vintage cars, lawnmowers and railways, collecting Victorian pin-cushions and sugar-tongs, and a whole host of other utterly pointless but somehow life-affirming activities. Now and again they do gather together in celebration of mutual eccentricity; google the Great Dorset Steam Fair and you’ll see what I’m getting at. Glyndebourne is much the same thing for people in penguin suits, albeit with different accents.
The Displaced of Mayfair will quietly retire to the country, and find themselves back in Real Britain, where they will continue to thrive.
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February 20, 2015 at 4:34 pm -
That’s a superb summary of eccentric passions!
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February 20, 2015 at 4:46 pm -
Thank you!
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