I’ve never before been into Grosvenor Chapel, the parish church of Mayfair next door to Harry’s Bar.   It’s quite sweet, rather like a parish church in New England, commissioned by Sir Richard Grosvenor in April 1730, possibly designed from a pattern book by its builder, Benjamin Timbrell, who had worked with Gibbs on the Oxford Chapel.   It cost £4,000.   The spiral volutes were added by William Skeat during repairs in 1829 and the chancel was poshed up just before the first world war by Ninian Comper:-

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I have had a residual memory of delivering a brown paper parcel down an alleyway to a Tudor house somewhere in Mayfair when I was working on a holiday job at Heywood Hill in the mid-1970s.   I realised where it was when I was walking down Mount Row this morning.   In amongst the normal Wrenaissance of Mount Street is a perfect Tudor house designed by Frederick Etchells, the Vorticist and translator of Corbusier’s Vers une architecture, in 1929.   It is as un-Corbusian as it is possible to imagine, complete with wood carving and a plaster ornamental wall:-

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I went for dinner for the first time in my life in The Goring Hotel, a whole new experience of the country in London, stuffed full of wedding parties (or maybe it was the Garden Party) and with the opportunity to play croquet on the lawn, odd in its location just near Victoria:-

I walked out into the courtyard of the RA at lunch-time and witnessed the full glory of its invasion by metallic triffids designed and installed by Conrad Shawcross.   It’s the prelude to this year’s Summer Exhibition:-

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I was walking down Weighhouse Street the night before last and was sad to see that its branch of United Dairies is closing down, a residue of the days when Mayfair was more obviously residential, still with corner shops:-

Nearby is the grandest possible Electricity Substation hidden under a large raised terrace opposite the Beaumont Hotel.   I’ve often wondered about it.   At either end there is a neo-baroque pavilion designed by Stanley Peach, a Scottish architect who had trained as a doctor, spent time in the Rocky Mountains and later designed Centre Court at Wimbledon:-

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I went to breakfast this morning in Alfred’s Club, one of those mysterious private clubs in Mayfair.   It occupies premises just behind Bourdon House, which used to be Mallett’s and is now Dunhill, with its own humidor downstairs.   Little is known of Bourdon who was the first lessee of the house in the early 1720s.   It’s presumed that he was Lieutenant William Bourdon who had been in the foot guards and was a Justice of the Peace, but the name was only attached to the house in the 1860s.   It’s the closest one can get to eighteenth-century Mayfair.

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