by Tim Moore
At the turn of the last century, Park Lane was without question the wealthiest, stateliest thoroughfare in London. Regularly interrupting its grand terraces – once home to Disraeli – were huge and graciously appointed mansions, palaces in effect. Modelled on an Italian palazzo, Dorchester House was completed in 1857 for R.S. Holford, who made a fortune supplying London’s tap water and blew £30,000 of it on a single staircase. The foundations of Brook House groaned under the weight of 800 tons of marble; Dudley House incorporated no fewer than six kitchens and employed one hundred staff. Grosvenor House boasted a Corinthian colonnade based on Trajan’s forum in Rome; the ballroom of Londonderry House was graced by unrivalled marble statuary.
Twenty-five years on only the owners had changed: anti-surfactant tycoon Lord Leverhulme splashed out his soap dosh on buying Grosvenor House from the Duke of Westminster and Louis Mountbatten was lounging on the balconies of Brook House. The smart but somehow jaunty Regency terraces between them still imparted the air of an impossibly grand seafront, an esplanade overlooking the rolling green ocean of Hyde Park. Then, really very suddenly, it all changed. Grosvenor House was eight-five years old when it went under the sledgehammer in 1927; Brook House twenty years younger when it met its violent end six years later. In between, a national outcry had failed to save Dorchester House: the Italians tried to acquire what even Chopper Clunn called ‘a mansion second to none in the metropolis’ as their embassy, and there were other attempts to refit it as a museum or even an opera house. Holford’s heirs needed £400,000 to pay off death duties, but campaigners could only raise £300,000 and in 1929 down it came. At the pre-demolition auction, that £30,000 staircase, still just seventy years old, was flogged off for 273 quid. If there was room in my attic I’d have bid 274.
I don’t suppose anyone needs telling what went up in their place. Park Lane had been playing Cluedo for almost a hundred years: in 1840 Lord Russell had his throat cut by his Swiss valet in a house backing on to Park Lane, and thirty-two years later a mistress of Lord Lucan (what was it with that lot?) was strangled at No. 13 by her maid. With such a tradition of pre-empting trends in the world of domestic amusements – and by this I mean board games rather than murder – it should have been no surprise that the street started playing Monopoly seven years before anyone else in Britain. Down came the houses, up went the hotels.
The Grosvenor House Hotel was opened in 1928, and the Dorchester three years later. In 1929, such was Park Lane’s cachet that the Park Lane Hotel – the first in Britain with an en suite in every room – was thus called despite being on Piccadilly. The erection of these grand hotels marked the end of an era in the most starkly strident fashion. The great Park Lane mansions had already passed from toffs to tycoons, but with rate bills hitting £5,000 even they could barely afford to run a big London house on the Upstairs, Downstairs model.
Domestic service was by no means in decline: at the end of the thirties, over 5 per cent of the working population were servants, including no less than a quarter of all employed women. Most middle-class Londoners had a maid, and a modestly successful professional – a doctor, perhaps, or an accountant – would employ a cook, a housemaid, a parlourmaid and a nanny. The number of live-in staff had in fact been increasing for almost twenty years, mostly due to economic migration from the desperate north: the Unemployment Assistance Board damned ‘the idleness and irresponsibility of young girls’ not prepared to travel the country looking for domestic service, and one agency alone was sending 2,000 Durham teenagers to London to work as servants every year. The culture shock would have been a 10,000 volter: one commentator spoke of ‘girls of eighteen who are unfamiliar with knives and forks’. From a how’s-yer-mam mining village to the lonely, hostile metropolis; gazing at the blurred glowers on the top deck of a passing bus it occurred to me that throughout my extensive recent wanderings about the city in which I’d lived for all these years, I had yet to spot a single familiar face in the crowd. (Oh, except Anne Robinson.)
But a live-in cleaning lady was one thing; six kitchens and a hundred staff were another. Shaken by the sight of armoured cars patrolling Oxford Street during the 1926 General Strike, even those few magnates who still possessed the financial wherewithal to run that sort of household increasingly opted to do their Gosford Park stuff in the mobless sanctuary of the Home Counties. For the staff they left behind it could have been disastrous – domestic servants weren’t allowed to claim dole – but as luck would have it there were plenty of just as miserably remunerated and drearily drudge-like jobs close at hand: as well as the 1,000 employed at the Lyons Corner House up at Marble Arch, many who had once trodden the servants’ staircases at Grosvenor or Dorchester House were soon pushing trolleys out of the service elevators in the structures that replaced them.
Striding with relief past the awful Intercontinental, I briefly managed to ignore the enormous structure spearing the grey sky directly before me. Turning dutifully to the right, I inspected another Bond Streetian outburst of pretentious exclusivity: oh to be an autograph hunter at the Met Bar, where celebrities endeavour to leapfrog each other in the ladder-tournament of fame, or a cleaner at Nobu, where Boris Becker shags women in broom cupboards. Then, finally, I permitted myself to gaze up at the penultimate Park Lane hotel, one whose reputation flirts with infamy: the thirty-storey London Hilton. Erected in 1963, I’d been severally informed that in the manner of the Dorchester and the Grosvenor House the Hilton had replaced a great Park Lane mansion, in this instance Londonderry House. Photographs of the latter’s interior in the days before its demolition in 1962 were terribly affecting – not the sort of crumbled-plastered, buckets-under-drips wreck you’d have imagined, but a proud and immaculate ancestral home, with portraits of many generations of eponymous marquesses and that famous ballroom, empty but for reclining marble nudes by your man Canova, of Three Graces fame. And the next photo in the archive box was an exterior shot of the half-finished Hilton, rising up through a cage of scaffolding before the newly laid dual carriageway.
What was interesting about this wasn’t the Triumph Herald which had all six lanes to itself, or the great hoarding out the front trumpeting the emergence of ‘London’s finest hotel’, but the unscathed neighbouring presence of a building that appeared to be Londonderry House. It had held out intact for thirty years longer than Dorchester House, only to be replaced not by ‘London’s finest hotel’ but the modest and anonymous concrete stack that now hosts Nobu, the Met Bar and its accompanying hotel and a bevy of dull financial institutions with UK in brackets after their names.
Lucky old Londonderry, many may say. Now almost forty years old, the Hilton still manages to pip Centre Point in media straw polls of London’s most vilified structures. In fact, in a kind of laugh-or-else-you’ll-cry sort of way, I find it hilarious. With its three concave flanks demanding to be photographed at an oblique angle from the ground up, the Hilton is nothing more than a 328-foot model from a Thunderbirds diorama. Every time I looked up at it I imagined Virgil bouncing jerkily out of a smoke-filled reception area with an unconscious security guard on his back.
I followed Park Lane round its Saxon turn and there, rearing up before me in unfortunate emulation of Earls Court’s exhibition centre, was the broad, sucked-in façade of the Dorchester Hotel. Opened in 1931, at £1¾ million this was at the time the most expensive non-public structure London had ever seen. It was clearly the sort of project where the accountants were bound, gagged and shoved under the table at site meetings: when someone fancifully suggested soundproofing the bedrooms with layers of cork and a particular variety of seaweed, not a voice was raised in protest and the next day off the trucks went to the beach.
Eisenhower requistioned the Dorchester as his war HQ – not attracted by the lavish facilities, or indeed Les Girls, the hotel’s multinational troupe of leggy cabaret starlets, but by the apparently unrivalled tensile strength of its reinforced concrete. As the Hilton was to in turn, however, the building dated with alarming swiftnes
s; appropriately acquired in the seventies by the world’s richest man, the Sultan of Brunei, it reopened in 1990 after a two-year, £100-million refit.
The first suggestions that this makeover may have erred into the realm of Arabesque gaud were the gold-painted traffic cones in front of each Bentley and Jaguar in the small car park in front, though I didn’t quite get the chance to foster any supplementary impressions after being expertly wafted back out of the reception area by two doormen. All I heard was a tinkle of piano; all I saw were a couple of square-faced clocks and a carpet that together gave the impression of a pre-war West End cinema foyer rather than anything grander. Then it was off again up the narrow pavement, trying to blot out sirens and diesel.
In 1930, 2,500 hunger marchers from the north arrived in Hyde Park, where they fought pitched battles with police that must have made exhilarating but also rather worrisome viewing from up on your Grosvenor House balcony. Hunger marchers returned to the capital in 1934 and ’35, and most memorably in 1936, the year of the Jarrow March. That year, more than one in nine of all births in Jarrow ended in the baby’s death, an infant mortality rate that ranks with the poorest African countries today and a shocking reminder of what a split nation Britain remained. Your chambermaid on ten bob a week might be a Geordie migrant, and that might be her brother out there with his skull under a police horse’s hoof; suddenly, Park Lane seemed a bit too near the class war’s front line.
It might have lost some of its lustre, but it would be foolishly misleading to suggest – as I appear to be doing – that Park Lane’s traffic hell and uninspired commercial structures align it with Monopoly streets of a different shade of blue. We are all snobs to some extent, after all, and in these terms the street remains a premium brand: Park Lane, remember, was preferred to Mayfair in the UK’s set on that EU Monopoly board, and nose-up to a glitzy estate agent’s window I saw flats in the street being advertised for £2,500 a week, which even accounting for such essential features as a ‘luggage room’ didn’t seem an unmissable bargain. And because I did say we are all snobs, I might as well tell you that this estate agent’s office was once the Grosvenor House, Park Lane branch of the National Westminster Bank, and that within its filing cabinets was a very thin folder marked Moore, T.S.P. (my word, how I’m regretting that prison confession). In fact, I’d actually opened the account there in my further education days on a friend’s recommendation: with telephone number deposits in most of the branch’s accounts, he accurately predicted they wouldn’t bother with the odd telephone extension student overdraft. But I do have to say it was also quite fun to write out cheques with Park Lane printed on them – even though my incompatible personal presentation did result in much signature scrutinising and, on more than one occasion, a telephone call to the manager. It should have been a sad day when I received news of the branch’s closure, but by the end of the letter I was strutting about the kitchen shrieking like a peacock: my account was being transferred to Curzon Street. It was the ultimate out-of-board Monopoly experience – I’d shifted my investments from Park Lane to Mayfair.
A couple of mothballed ‘All Enquiries’ blocks, then a surviving parade of breezy, bow-fronted Regency houses with a cobbled private road in front and ambassadorial flags above. And there, at No. 100, the solitary extant Park Lane mansion, Dudley House: once home to an earl and his six kitchens, but now the headquarters of a company that identified itself, rather grimly, as Hammerson, wherein behind revolving doors two distant receptionists were perched self-consciously at the foot of a grand and echoing staircase. London, I mused sadly, was no longer defined by colourfully prominent individuals – Lord Camelford, Gordon Selfridge, Stanley Green – but impersonal collective entities: corporations, tourists, street associations. Its story was now told not in the first but the third person plural.
Ultimately, Park Lane’s malaise was not to do with the bricks and mortar you might call its permanent residents, but – once again – its passing trade. Euston Road had always been a bypass, but the fate of Park Lane – now a grim parody of itself, of the verdant tranquillity that had defined it – was the greater tragedy. It wasn’t a lane, and unless you were looking out from the third floor or higher, there wasn’t a park. Why, when those houses lined up along the North Circular Road were now unsaleably blighted, were people still queuing up to pay £2,500 a week to overlook an urban freeway barely less appalling?
Disorientated in the subway labyrinth under Marble Arch I emerged at the Hyde Park exit by mistake, and surprised that the gates were still open – none of this ‘closed at dusk’ idiocy here, apparently – I wandered in. After only a few paces the traffic roar was filtered by the trees to a muted hiss, and suddenly I was alone in dark, bucolic magnificence, the silhouetted trees and the contours of low, smooth eminences stretching endlessly away before me.
Looking behind at the hotel and apartment blocks winking their lights through the highest branches it was now clear that almost everyone who lived on Park Lane did so at altitude, comfortably above that third floor, at heights where the traffic would trouble the senses of only the suicidally curious. In the context of all this untrammelled acreage those six lanes seemed almost irrelevant, ants across the path of the world’s largest and most splendid front garden. You can take the lane out of the park, but you can’t take the park out of the lane. Or something.
Except as a packet of cheap fags and a defunct pornographic monthly, Mayfair doesn’t exist. The only relevant address in the A-Z is Mayfair Place, a tiny stub of a road laid over part of Devonshire House’s back garden in 1924, and the name is shunned by Westminster Council and other official bodies. Swish and genteel as it was and is, I have no doubt that without the international influence of Vic and Marge’s most eccentric choice, the quadrilateral area contained within Piccadilly, Park Lane, Oxford Street and Regent Street would not have accrued and retained such exceptional allure.
Monopoly made Mayfair just as, for many, Mayfair made Monopoly. Such was its magical, talismanic appeal, even seasoned players would do idiotic deals to procure it. Transgressing at least five of the deadly sins, possession of Mayfair seemed to offer absolute power, corrupting its owners and coveters accordingly – they could have made an Indiana Jones film about it. Mighty property empires were laid low by the Tolkienesque Mayfair curse: one street to rule them all. I once sold that transcendental title deed to a cousin for two grand plus the orange set. And he didn’t even have Park Lane.
No one ever turned down the chance to buy Mayfair at face value, even if it meant entering the dark, tortuous maze where the mortgage monster roamed. No matter how many times you’ve played, when you’re the first to land on Mayfair there’s still a thrill; and when you aren’t, you’ll travel round the board with half an eye on how close your run-up is taking you to that hotel bill from hell. Two thousand quid – a £100 note was a handy sum in Monopoly, and that was, like, twenty of them. And you’d never even touched the sodding minibar.
The image of a bright red hotel, stark and oppressive in the centre of that strip of deep blue, is an iconic one. Though you might only land on Mayfair once in a deep-blue moon – in terms of ‘hits’ per game, Chris ranks it in the bottom half-dozen – when you did, you didn’t forget it. The chicken-run up beyond Go To Jail was known in more than one family as Death Row, and once that big red ’un went up on Mayfair, a tense gladiatorial theatre ensued whenever a token clacked up to the board’s eastern flank. Even in our breakneck games, a respectful hush fell around the board. Some players would recklessly hurl down the dice with impulsive, Butch Cassidy bravado; for others, it was an agonisingly drawn-out, any-last-requests ordeal. Moist palms would be blown into, lips licked, hoped-for dice totals murmured mantra-like. This was the nearest we got to Russian roulette: even when the greens were also fully loaded there were empty chambers – Community Chest, Chance, GO – as well as the rubber bullets of Liverpool Street and Super Tax.
For the Mayfair hotelier himself, it was not a time for showmanship.
The moment he’d switched his four greens for one red he had marked himself down as the man to beat, the man to hate, the pantomime villain. If, as so many Mayfair landlords tended to be, he was an honours graduate of the ‘It’s a pleasure doing business with you’ school of rent collection, an advance down-payment on those Community Chest medical bills might be in order.
In the end, when you did wind up on Mayfair it would usually be via some farcial anticlimax: you’d land on Liverpool Street, only to hear those nose-thumbing whoops die in your throat as the next roll was a four, or you’d blithely plonk your Scottie on that Chance square next to The Angel, and, like a whistling, carefree milkman shot through the neck by a lunatic urban sniper, turn over ADVANCE TO MAYFAIR. Criminal psychologists and addiction counsellors could save a lot of time by scrapping all that blather about personality profiles and upbringing in place of a single yes or no question: have you ever landed on a Park Lane hotel then rolled a double one?
Occupying the first two weeks of a month I’m going to make you guess at, the annual fair held in the fields north of Piccadilly was about as classy as an event based around a seventeenth-century cattle market is ever likely to be. There were jugglers, puppet shows, tarts and the intriguing ‘hasty-pudding eaters’, who competed to ingest the greatest quantity of semolina in the shortest time. Bare-knuckle fighting was popular, as was ‘women’s foot racing’; for tuppence you could watch pinioned ducks being thrown into a pond full of spaniels.