The Last Hundred Years
The census of 1871 was taken about a decade before the
commencement of the period of greatest change in the
whole history of the Grosvenor estate in Mayfair since
its first development for building. The widespread
rebuildings initiated by the first Duke in the 1880's and
1890's have already been described from the historical
viewpoint. Socially, they seem to have had two main
effects—they increased the segregation both between
class and class and between the private residents and the
men of commerce; and they increased the proportion of
private residents in a number of important streets on the
estate, at least in part at the expense of the tradesmen.
These, at all events, are the impressions gained from
such evidence—mainly the Post Office Directories—as is
at present available. Sometimes they were the results of
deliberate policies laid down by the Duke, and always
they reflected the immiscibility of the numerous social
gradations prevalent in the late Victorian and Edwardian
world.
The provision of churches, schools, artisans' dwellings,
a library and two public gardens, the removal of the workhouse and the drastic reduction in the number of public
houses, were all as much a part of the first Duke's achievement as the replacement of hundreds of old and often
dingy houses by solid expensive new ranges of shops and
chambers and private dwellings. In many parts of the
estate this tremendous tidying-up operation stamped
Victorian social discipline and formality upon the more
easy-going attitudes of earlier times, and even when it
was not intentional, physical changes of this order of
magnitude could not fail to produce correspondingly
great social change as well.
The elimination of trade from certain streets or parts
of them, and its concentration in others, were certainly
intentional. This was done in Park Street, Green Street,
Charles Street (now Carlos Place) and the western part
of Mount Street which became exclusively residential,
while shops were encouraged in South Audley Street. (ref. 39)
Between 1871 and 1914 the number of both commercially
and professionally occupied houses in the eastern part of
Grosvenor Street was reduced, with a corresponding
increase in private residence, and in Upper Grosvenor
Street even the successful physicians and surgeons who
had gained a foothold in the 1870's were eliminated. Only
in the eastern part of Brook Street, where the proportion
of commercial occupation increased between 1871 and
1914, did the Duke's separatist policies not prevail. (ref. 40)
Policies of this kind undoubtedly enjoyed the support
of well-to-do residents, and after the first Duke's death
in 1899 they were continued by his successor and his
advisers. Some residents, indeed, notably those of
Grosvenor Street and Park Street, were even successful
in insisting that they should be adhered to in circumstances in which the Estate Board would have preferred
to relax them. (ref. 41)
The new buildings erected in the 1880's and subsequent
years also had a marked effect on the social composition
of the residents. The houses built in Green Street, the
western part of Mount Street and in South Street (Nos.
39–47 odd) always found ready buyers, (ref. 42) but their high
price restricted the market to purchasers with substantial
means. And so too, in somewhat lesser degree, did the
price of the new flats built over shops in such streets as
South Audley Street and the eastern part of Mount Street.
Wealth was what counted in the recruitment of residents,
and even though the first and second Dukes both wanted
to have what they regarded as 'small private houses' such
as those in South Street, no concession was made to
slender pockets, as Miss Walpole was crushingly informed
when she inquired in 1895 'if it is the intention of the
Duke to build middle class dwellings in South Street. She
wishes to live near Farm Street Roman Catholic Church
and the flats in Mount Street are too expensive.' (ref. 43)
As early as 1880 H. T. Boodle had foreseen that 'flats
should be encouraged for the upper classes as well as the
working classes as they are found of great use'. (ref. 44) At first
these had been built over shops in the commercial streets,
one of the earliest examples being Audley Mansions in
South Audley Street of 1884–6 (Plate 33d). This type of
building was evidently extremely successful, for it provided a good address for both shopkeepers and private
residents while keeping them quite apart from each other,
the flats being approached by separate entrances. At
corner sites, such as Audley Mansions, the private
entrances could even be placed in a residential street (in
this case the western part of Mount Street) while the
commercial entrance could be at or round the corner in
a shopping street.
By means of these large, carefully designed dualpurpose buildings the proportion of floor space in private
use even in avowedly commercial streets could be substantially increased. Although there is no firm evidence
on this point, the internal disposition of the buildings
themselves suggests that the shopkeepers now generally
lived elsewhere instead of generally upstairs, as the census
of 1871 (made before rebuilding) shows to have been
hitherto the usual practice. Taking the number of entries
in the Post Office Directories as a rough guide (the only
one available) the proportion of tradesmen fell substantially, and that of private residents rose correspondingly, between 1871 and 1914, in Mount Street, North and
South Audley Streets and Duke Street. In Brook Street
and Grosvenor Street (the whole of these streets on the
estate being here considered) there were similar changes,
though of lesser degree, and as we have already seen, trade
was wholly excluded from Park Street, Green Street and
the new Carlos Place. In about 1914, it may be hazarded,
the private residents formed a larger proportion of
the total population of the estate than ever before or
since.
This increase finds indirect expression in the new social
and financial origins of many rich residents willing and
anxious to pay for a good address on the Grosvenor estate
in late Victorian and Edwardian times— origins very
different from those of the traditional landed aristocracy
and gentry. Following the earlier example of the oldestablished brewers, it was now the turn of the new
industrialists and capitalists, both native and foreign, to
edge their way into even the innermost social sanctuary
of Grosvenor Square itself, where at various times lived,
for instance, Sir John Kelk the building contractor, Baron
Furness the Hartlepool shipping magnate, Sir Edward
Mackay Edgar the Canadian company director, Samuel
Lewis the moneylender, and the financiers John Pierpont
Morgan junior and Sir Ernest Cassel. In Park Lane lived
two Duveens, in Park Street (in houses looking out across
the garden of Grosvenor House to Hyde Park), two
Rothschilds; and so on. (ref. 40)
It was in the houses of such people as these, and in those
of such old families as were still able to afford to compete
at the highest level in the fashionable world, that in the
years before the war of 1914–18 the traditional social
round of the London Season reached its last opulent and
glitteringly artificial climax. Entry to and status within
even the innermost circles could now generally be bought,
for the cost in itself provided the necessary degree of
exclusiveness. In 1905 Sir Ernest Cassel paid a premium
of £10,000 for the renewal of the leases of Brook House,
Park Lane, and the adjoining house, and spent £20,000
on adapting them to provide an appropriately magnificent
setting for his receptions there, the proposed approach
to the dining-room being specially designed 'level with
the ground floor … (for the convenience of the King)'. (ref. 45)
A few years later Mrs. Keppel, before starting to spend
some £15,000 on the renovation of No. 16 Grosvenor
Street, submitted her plans to the King, 'who had
approved of them', but who probably only visited the
house on a single occasion before his death in May 1910. (ref. 46)
And from such central points as these a succession of
ever-widening ripples spread out all over both the
fashionable and the would-be fashionable worlds, powerful enough to confer a rent 'for the season' of up to £1,000
on even a house in noisy dusty Hereford Gardens. (ref. 47)
Matching the increased private residential use of parts
of the estate after the great rebuilding was the apparent
decline in the proportion of commercial use. If there were
fewer businesses after the first Duke's reconstructions,
it was, evidently, because the weakest had gone to the
wall. In his evidence before the Select Committee of the
House of Commons on Town Holdings, H. T. Boodle
had said that 'in many cases of rebuilding it is impossible
to let the old tenants rebuild. The tenants would not be
equal to it', and he had admitted that compulsory displacements had been made. (ref. 48) These casualties had been
amongst the little men (and women) with a shop or
business at home or round the corner, and whose numbers
(attested in the census of 1871) must have made much
shopping and petty commerce so local in character before
the rebuildings. The survivors, on the other hand, were
the strongest and fittest—men like W. J. Goode, the South
Audley Street china-dealer, whose business expanded
from a single house (where he lived with his family) (ref. 49) to
take in the whole frontage between South Street and the
Grosvenor Chapel; or James Purdey the gunsmith, who
after building his own premises in South Audley Street,
was only too anxious to speculate elsewhere on the estate;
or T. B. Linscott, the confectioner, whose shop in Oxford
Street flourished greatly after he had reluctantly rebuilt
it. (ref. 50) These were the men able to stimulate and then cater
for the demands of a wealthy clientèle, primarily in the
luxury and semi-luxury trades in which many of the shops
of the area were now engaged. And in its hotels—now the
other commercial speciality of the estate—the change
from the old-fashioned comforts provided by William
Claridge and Auguste Scorrier in adapted private dwellings to the discreetly spacious splendours newly built
by Claridge's Hotel Company Limited and the Coburg
Hotel Company Limited must have been just as great.
For the working-class residents on the estate the
principal result of the first Duke's rebuildings was a great
improvement in the standard of their housing. The blocks
of artisans' dwellings built immediately south of Oxford
Street, mainly between 1886 and 1892, provided new
accommodation for nearly two thousand people—equivalent almost to fourteen per cent of the total population of
the estate in 1871—and in the early years of the twentieth
century the flats there were in very great demand, often
from locally employed servants (butlers and valets in particular) and policemen. (ref. 51) In addition an unknown but
very substantial number of residents in the mews were
rehoused by the widespread rebuilding of coach-houses
and stables in such places as Adams Row, Balfour Mews,
Bourdon Street, Mount Row and Three Kings Yard.
Some of these premises were of considerable size, space
for six or seven stalls and three or four carriages being
sometimes provided, (ref. 52) and even when complete rebuilding did not take place, tenants were often required, as
a condition for the renewal of their leases, to execute
extensive works of modernisation. (ref. 53)
Much of this great surge of improvement in the mews
took place in the years immediately preceding the gradual
eclipse of the horse by the motor car. By 1910 tenants on
the estate were said to have a 'general desire to get rid of
horses', (ref. 54) and the second Duke and his Board were granting increasing numbers of licences for the use of coachhouses and stables as garages. At about this time this
process was taken a stage further by the occasional conversion of stables into dwelling houses, the first known
example being at No. 2 Aldford Street in 1908; (ref. 55) and in
later years the size and quality of these equine palaces
was such that many of them proved well suited for
adaptation to domestic use for residents no longer able
or willing to live in a great house in one of the fashionable
streets.
The outbreak of war in 1914 marked the commencement of fundamental changes in the social character of
the estate. Throughout Mayfair as a whole the population
had been falling slowly since as early as 1851, and although
the first Duke's rebuilding may have temporarily reversed
this process on the Grosvenor estate, numbers in Mayfair
as a whole were again falling in the early twentieth century.
For the estate by itself no reliable figures can be calculated
for some sixty years after 1871, but during that period the
resident population fell from 14,829 in 1871 to some 8,775
in 1931. (fn. a) By 1961 it had declined still further to an estimated 4,354. (ref. 56)
It has already been conjectured that in the years before
1914 the private residents formed a larger proportion of
the total population of the estate than ever before or since.
Whether this conjecture is correct or not, the steep decline
in the aggregate resident population reflects the great
increase in the number of non-resident business users
which has transformed the social make-up of the estate
since 1914.
At the very top of the social scale the evidence of the
Post Office Directories suggests that in the 1920's and
1930's there was little change in the number of peers,
baronets, knights and other persons of title resident on
the estate, despite the numerous new creations made in
those years. The ritual of the social Season still continued,
and in the unfashionable months cruises to the Mediterranean or the West Indies, or forays to shoot big game in
Africa replaced the visits of earlier days to the German
spas. But cocktail parties ('by far the cheapest way of
entertaining') and 'Cheap cabarets and intime night clubs'
were replacing the lavish private receptions of Edwardian
times; and the prevalence of jokes about income tax
collectors showed that it was now becoming 'almost a
social stigma to be rich. It is fashionable to pretend to be
poorer, not richer, than you are.' (ref. 57)
The lack of change in the number of residents of title
obscures important internal changes, however. Old
families were giving place to new, and by 1947 the titles
of approximately half the peers resident on the estate had
been created since 1900. Between 1921 and 1939 the
Dukes of Portland and Somerset and Earl Fitzwilliam
and the Earl of Durham all left Grosvenor Square, whilst
the newcomers included two new barons (Illingworth and
Selsdon). By 1939 four of the eight peers resident in the
square lived in the new flats there, and the fifteenth Earl
of Pembroke, one of whose eighteenth-century ancestors
had had a house in the square, now lived in Three Kings
Yard. In 1933 the first Viscount Furness left Grosvenor
Square for Lees Place, and by 1947 even such a traditional
grandee as the Duke of Sutherland had moved from
Hampden House in Green Street to a flat in Park
Lane. (ref. 40)
In addition to the continuing decline in their absolute
numbers, many residents were thus occupying less space
individually. By 1939 only about a quarter of all the houses
in Brook Street, for instance, were still in private occupation, and a diagram prepared for The Grosvenor Estate
Strategy for Mayfair and Belgravia, published in 1971,
shows not a single building in the whole of either Brook
Street or Grosvenor Street still in solely residential use. (ref. 58)
By that time a substantial proportion of the surviving
residents lived either in modern blocks of flats or in the
mews and the lesser streets—Adams Row, Reeves Mews,
Balfour Mews and Culross Street are cases in point—and
Grosvenor Square itself could only be considered to be
still predominantly residential by virtue of the two large
hotels recently built there. The fall in the number of
residents had, indeed, gone so far that throughout the
whole estate only about one third of all the floor space
was still, in 1960, in residential occupation (ref. 59) — a remarkable reversal of the traditional character of the area.
Some of the buildings hitherto in private use are now
occupied by foreign diplomatic missions, for which
imposing mansions provide an appropriate setting. In
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries embassies and
legations had from time to time alighted for a while on
different parts of the estate, but in 1910 there was only
one—the Italian Embassy, then at No. 20 Grosvenor
Square—and the permanent presence of a foreign diplomatic community here dates only from the 1920's. In
1921 there were seven embassies and legations (four of
them in Grosvenor Square), but to-day there are nine,
plus five high commissions and two consulates; and some
of them are very large—notably the embassies of Egypt
and the United States and the Canadian High Commission—and with their ancillary premises occupy more
than one building.
A much greater proportion of the accommodation
previously in private residential use had, however, been
converted into offices, which in 1960 occupied about one
third of all the floor space on the estate. (ref. 59) As early as 1929
The Evening News reported that 'Ancient families are
leaving Mayfair and modern dressmakers or beauty or
health specialists are arriving'; and 'a West End property
expert' declared that Mayfair 'is going over to business
as fast as it can … Not so long ago a large house…
remained to let for a year without a single inquiry. At
last a condition against the use of any part of it for
business was withdrawn. It was snapped up then within
the next 48 hours.' (ref. 60)
In the 1920's and 30's the Grosvenor Estate itself was
'strongly opposed' (ref. 61) to the spread of offices, but in 1934
the second Duke's advisers acknowledged that trade and
business had for many years been moving westward, and
in streets such as Brook Street and Grosvenor Street they
had conducted a slow rearguard action, here and there
permitting first a professional occupation (usually by
a doctor or dentist), then an inconspicuous business
(usually dressmaking) and finally, perhaps, a shop
window. By 1939, however, this process had advanced
a little further, for some of the doctors and dentists in
their turn were beginning to move out of Brook Street
and Grosvenor Street. Those that remained, instead of
living there in individual houses as at first had been the
practice, were congregating together in houses evidently
used only as non-resident consulting rooms, of which
No. 86 Brook Street, for instance, contained some twenty
sets. Even in Upper Grosvenor Street, where a few
physicians and surgeons had again settled in the 1870's
(only to be subsequently eased out again in favour of
private residents), clubs, couturiers and other businesses
began to appear in the late 1920's, soon after the building
of the new Grosvenor House on the south side.
It was at this time of delicate transition that the impact
of the war of 1939–45 tilted the balance heavily towards
office use. During the war a number of buildings were
requisitioned for this purpose, and after the destruction
of large parts of the City of London by bombing, many
businesses moved into the mansions of Mayfair, then
often vacant through the departure of the residents to the
country, and in rapidly changing social conditions no
longer suitable for private occupation. (ref. 62) The Grosvenor
Estate itself reversed its previous opposition to the growth
of offices on its Mayfair properties, leaving Belgravia
unchallenged as London's principal fashionable residential quarter. On the Mayfair estate the professions—
no longer dominated by the doctors and dentists, who did
not return in large numbers after the war of 1939–45—
and the diplomats were joined by businessmen with
either relatively small staffs or small headquarters staffs,
all of whom required a prestigious address and often a
sumptuous 'Board Room' office suite in an adapted
Georgian or Victorian town house. Advertising and public
relations firms (of which there were some thirty in 1965)
found a natural milieu here; expensive restaurants did
well, and many of the shops dealt in the fields of fashion
or luxury. Despite this new emphasis on business and
commerce the estate has thus maintained its traditional
prestige; but in 1970 the Post Office Directory listed only
one solitary duke as still resident there; and even the Duke
of Westminster himself now lived in Belgravia.