Mayfair walk

Another week-end and another very enjoyable family London walk. The weather is being particularly kind at the moment and there are few nicer places to be than London on a beautiful day. (Well, actually, I can think of some places, but given the resources at hand it’s pretty good.) We have been gradually working our way round London over the last few years, trying to explore under the skin of our capital city. It has been inhabited for something like 6000 years in various forms so literally everywhere you go you are stepping in the footprints of history. That is a wonderful feeling and quite head spinning if you really think about it too much. Simple things such as street names often have very old and historical reasons why they’re called that. Or the basic trace of a road may not have changed for several hundred years, just the buildings on it.

This weekend we went around one of the wealthiest areas of town called Mayfair. It is home to some of the richest estates in the country and many of the embassies. It borders onto St James Palace (where we went a couple of weeks ago) and the Royal Parks such as Hyde Park. It is home to many of the big designer labels and has the most expensive shopping street in London within its boundaries (Bond Street).

It was a fascinating walk although maybe not the most diverse we have done. The whole area just reeked of money and everything was very private – big walls, big doors, big shutters. All the streets were tidy and the flowerbeds and houses very neatly kept. It did feel a bit soulless in a way because everything was so ordered. But you can imagine that the residents here would be very busy people running things or wealthy enough that the house in Mayfair is probably just a convenient pad to stop in while visiting town.

One of the highlights was going to the National Gallery which we’d never visited, and included seeing the largest collection of Constable paintings I have ever come across. I’m more into Impressionist art, but it is impressive looking at a painting done several hundred years ago and worth several million £. And like many of the galleries and museums in London the building itself was almost as impressive as the work contained within it.