General Information
Mayfair is named after the annual 14-day-long May Fair that used to take place on the site where Shepherd Market is today. On 21 April 1926, Queen Elizabeth II was born at 17 Bruton Street, her maternal grandfather’s London house in the area of Mayfair. Today, it is a prestigious locality filled with several businesses and some interesting buildings.
Additional Information
Until 1686, the May Fair was held in Haymarket, and after 1764, it moved to Fair Field in Bow because well-to-do residents of the area felt the fair lowered the tone of the neighbourhood.
The oldest cottage in Mayfair was believed to date from 1618. It was destroyed in the Blitz in late 1940. A plaque in Stanhope Row, near Shepherd Market, marks its former site. Mayfair was anciently part of the parish of St Martin in the Fields, and became part of St George Hanover Square in 1724.
Most of the area was first developed between the mid 17th century and the mid 18th century as a fashionable residential district, by a number of landlords, the most important of them being the Dukes of Westminster and the Grosvenor family. The Grosvenor family has owned 40 hectares of Mayfair since 1677, when Sir Thomas Grosvenor married Mary Davies, heiress to part of the Manor of Ebury. The freehold of a large section of Mayfair also belongs to the Crown Estate.
The district is now mainly commercial, with many offices in converted houses and new buildings, including major corporate headquarters, a concentration of hedge funds, real estate businesses and many different embassy offices, namely the US’s large office taking up all the west side of Grosvenor Square.
Rents are among the highest in London and the world. There remains a substantial quantity of residential property as well as some exclusive shopping and London’s largest concentration of luxury hotels and restaurants.
Buildings in Mayfair include both the Canadian High Commission and the United States embassy in Grosvenor Square, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Handel House Museum, the Grosvenor House Hotel, Claridge’s and the Dorchester. The renown and prestige of Mayfair could have grown in the popular mind because it is the most expensive property on the British Monopoly set.
Mayfair also boasts some of the capital’s most exclusive shops, hotels, restaurants and clubs. Just alongside Burlington House is one of London’s most luxurious shopping areas, the Burlington Arcade, which has housed shops under its glass-roofed promenade since 1819.