Tag: mayfair

advance to mayfair

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Mayfair is one of those parts of London I’ve frankly ignored for too long. Last year we nearly walked around there, to find the Mercato that we’d heard was cool, but after looking walking over to Savile Row to see where the Beatles played in 1969 on the roof, we ended up catching a tube to St. Paul’s for a walking tour of the City (those Blue Badge guides know their stuff). So I had it on my list to explore this area finally, for the first time in I don’t know how long. It’s that big area full of big super expensive buildings and flash cars, embassies and posh hotels, more Rolls Royces than you can dream of, all bounded by Park Lane, Oxford Street, Piccadilly and Regent Street. That’s a big area and it’s not all the same (I am not even sure all of it is ‘Mayfair’, except in the geography of my mind, but we call it that). So on this trip, I decided to make an effort to explore Mayfair again. I actually used to come through here almost every day, twenty-five years ago, on an open-top tour bus, telling the same old stories, waving at the barber, humming the Nightingale song in Berkeley Square song because I didn’t know the words (or the tune) (or the title, evidently), pointing out where the Queen was born (not the original building) and where Jimi Hendrix used to live before he died. Those well-rehearsed yarns have faded in the memory but not as much as the streets themselves; walking around it was like reading a book I had not read since I was a kid, knowing the lines and the characters but still being completely surprised by the story. I was certainly surprised by the little red Mini parked outside a fancy hotel, covered in a Christmas tree, people were stopping to take photos and so I had to grab a sketch. All along the street were expensive cars, this was Grosvenor Street. The Grosvenors are the big cheeses in this part of central London, and many other parts too, they are the Dukes of Westminster. The Grosvenors built this whole area, as well as Belgravia. This street leads up to Grosvenor Square, formerly the location of the massive U.S. Embassy, and the last time I was there, and in this part of town, was in 2005 when I completed my application for Permanent Residency, and had to go to the Embassy, hand in all my paperwork, have a little interview, pledge allegiance with my hand up (that was odd, did that happen?) and then it was all good, I can go ahead and live in America, and I’ve been doing that ever since.

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I found the Mercato Mayfair, an incredible food court inside an old church. There are lots of different options from around the world as well as a bar over where the altar would have been. It was done up all festive for Christmas, and I grabbed some south-east Asian food and a fruity soda and had a late lunch/early supper. I still had a lot of drawing I wanted to do in Mayfair, and the daylight was already getting short. I walked over to Duke Street, near the magnificent Ukrainian church (how had I never seen this building before?) to the unusual Brown Hart Gardens. I’ve seen these on walking tour videos (tall tales about elephants being kept here) and one of the Urban Sketchers London events was around here a year or so ago, and I had really enjoyed all their sketches of these domes. I stood among the rich people in nice clothes and sketched. Behind me three suited men talked loudly about work, all business and deals and masculinity. I would have found it hard being a Man of Business, not the life for me guv. The sunset was causing all sorts of colours to appear in the sky, and made the buildings look as if they were made of gold, which they probably are.

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A lot of the buildings nearby do look pretty golden. I found myself walking down past the Connaught Hotel, which is a five star hotel that looks like it needs a few more stars added to that description. I didn’t draw it this time, but I did stand outside the Pasticceria Marchesi across the road on Mount Street to sketch the beautiful window display. Their cakes were more like crowns or ornate cushions, and there was a line out of the door. This terracotta building was designed by William Henry Powell and I seem to remember having to say something about Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee when talking about it on the tour, back in the days when Queen Vic was the only one who’d ever had one.

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The next stop was Berkeley Square, of the aforementioned song about a nightingale. I had forgotten how big this square is, and even though it was already dark I was amazed at how beautiful it was. I’d honestly not been there since swinging past on a Big Bus pointing out all the Ferraris. The one story I always had to mention were the London Plane trees, as there are a lot of them here, trees that were strong and particularly resilient to the infamous London pollution. I had to sketch one of course, in pencil this time, another tree for the collection. I imagined walking through here on a smoggy evening in Victoria times with horse drawn carriages and top hats and gas-lamps. Now it’s Bentleys and Maseratis, and I did notice that many of the map-posts have been converted into special chargers for electric cars, they just plug them into the lamp-post. We live in the future now my friends. I pressed my nose against the Ferrari showroom checking out a car that costs a quarter of a million quid.

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Finally, a famous old pub on the corner of Bruton Street, near where the Queen was born (I suppose these days I should say ‘Queen Elizabeth II’ rather than just ‘The Queen’ in case you think I mean Camilla, or Taylor Swift), at Number 17. The Coach and Horses is the oldest pub in Mayfair, and history pours off of it. I didn’t go in this time, but I’ve been inside many years ago with my mate Tel. I have wanted to sketch this pub for years, another in the mock Tudor style (see my sketches from earlier that day for more of that) so it was always going to be my final destination, but as I stood on the other side of the street drawing the outline, and red buses and taxis passed between us, I ended up just drawing the outlines and scribbling the rest in later, as I had to catch a tube and a bus to Highgate Village. It was a nice stroll around Mayfair, well worth the 400 quid in Monopoly money. I mean, pound for pound, square foot for square foot, it’s the cheapest place on the board.

liberty’s before lunchtime

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While in London last month I took a day to sketch and explore Mayfair, and area I have not really walked around in a long, long time. It’s good to not stick to the same places each time I go back. However I wanted to start my day somewhere more familiar, draw a lot of old timbered beams, and maybe do a bit of Christmas shopping along the way. I have sketched Liberty’s of London before, but it was a long, long time ago, when I drew smaller snippets of buildings, and in that case not very well. It’s such a big old building, a massive department store in mock-Tudor behind Oxford Circus station, that you want to spend the time to really catch all the details. I chose a spot on Great Marlborough Street that looked down Kingly Street on the right, a street well worth a day of detailed sketching in itself (but which I always associate with fancy bars and cozy pubs, having spent a few evenings down there with friends back in the old days either drinking cool cocktails among media types or room-temperature beer among tourists). It’s an intriguing little corner of the sketch that, like a window that you open on an advent calendar. There’s a fun idea for an advent calendar, one that for each window, you are taken to a new place full of other windows. I’m not sure how it would work but I can imagine quite a bit. The sun was blue and the sky was shining, there were clouds dotted about to make it more interesting for me when I drew the little triangle of colour on the top left. I wasn’t sure how much colour I would add to this drawing, it being an essentially black and white building, so I just added spots here and there, such as the golden parts (with my gold gel pen) and flags. Unfortunately I did not colour all the trees in, just putting in some green, the uncoloured ones were purple. I should have added that, I’m not averse to colouring-in later after all (I’m the king of colouring-in later, saves so much time on those days of exploration), but I never got around to it and the moment’s passed. Purple is very much the corporate colour for Liberty’s, though at this time they were also very invested in green as they were promoting the movie ‘Wicked’, and had large displays about it in their windows and interior. The whole sketch took me about an hour and fifty minutes (yes not quite two hours, I was determined to finish by midday and press a hard stop, though I spent some time faffing about taking pictures of it). I did go inside and look around, bought some Christmas ornaments and stocking stuffers in their amazing festive department on the top floor. I don’t remember ever walking around here before, it’s very wooden and unusual inside, well worth a look. Some of the things they have for sale are a bit expensive mind, the designer goods. I’d like to make a point of sketching more of the big old department stores of London, I drew Fortnum’s already, now Liberty’s. I tried to draw Harrod’s last year but it was covered over with scaffolding (to hide their shame presumably, given news reports about their former owner) and then there’s Selfridges on Oxford Street. I always took that for granted, but when I passed by it later on this day I remembered how absolutely immense it is, so I’ll leave that for another time. 

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I could have spent the day sketching just around this little corner, looking across Regent Street with this winter sunlight hitting things just right. Carnaby street is nearby, but I don’t like it there much any more, it’s too bland, and there are just not any football shirt shops any more. The best was SoccerScene, a shop that did more than anything to enflame my lifelong obsession with interesting foreign football teams and their shirts (and their metal pin badges, they had a huge array of those). I remember further down Great Marlborough Street there used to be a fantastic foreign language bookshop, the best one in London, and when I was in college I spent a lot of time there looking at all sorts of interesting books in French, German, Italian, Danish, whatever was tickling my linguistics at the time. It’s gone now. Grant and Cutler, that was it. It seems they have merged with Foyles and have a section of that massive bookshop on Charing Cross Road, but I miss the feel of that other place. Anyway I was wasting time reminiscing in nostalgia again, I had to go to Mayfair.

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I’ll put the Mayfair sketches in another post, it’s only fair, but this is another timbered building that I drew next, the Mason’s Arms on Maddox Street. It’s opposite a really interesting church which I’ll draw another time called St. George’s Church Hanover Square. This is across Regent Street, and I came across here rarely, probably feeling that this part of town was not for oiks like me from Burnt Oak. People get progressively richer with each passing square foot. I think I only had about a square foot of pavement to sketch on, the streets were a little tight, probably why they’re so rich eh. All the old tour guide jokes coming out now. I remember going down Regent Street on the bus once talking about Soho when an American tourist asked me why it was called Soho and is it named after the SoHo in New York. I said no it isn’t, that area is a contraction of ‘South of Houston’, whereas the one in London is ‘South of Hoxford Street’.  After finishing my sketch of the Mason’s I popped in to sit down and grab a drink. I ended up not eating, saving my appetite for the Mercado in Mayfair which was my destination, but it was a nice little pub, historic (1721, though rebuilt as it looks now in 1934 in that Mock Tudor style; a new Lego set has just come out which reminds me of this, I might have to get it). The Rolling Stones had offices on Maddox Street and used to record at Chappell Studios a few doors down, as did the Beatles occasionally. It’s good to read the signs on the pub wall.