Belgravia

One white palace of a neighbourhood, built to a single design, with mews lanes and old pubs hidden behind it.

Fields until 1826, and dangerous ones: this was the Five Fields, crossed by a path where people were robbed after dark. Then the Grosvenor family, who owned the land, put Thomas Cubitt to work on it. Cubitt was a builder rather than an architect, and he did something new by employing every trade himself instead of parcelling the work out, which is how the terraces went up between 1830 and 1847 to one height, one design and one colour. That colour is the point of Belgravia. The brick is faced with render and painted cream, so a whole street reads as a single enormous palace rather than as a row of houses. Belgrave Square has forty-nine mansions round a private garden; Eaton Square, longer and plainer, took twenty-nine years to finish. Behind them run the mews, the back lanes where the horses and coachmen were kept, now some of the most expensive small houses in the country. Hardly anybody can afford to live in most of it and increasingly nobody does: the grandest houses are embassies, and others are held empty as investments. What is left for a visitor is the walking, which is genuinely good. The squares are handsome, the mews are quiet enough to hear your own footsteps, and the pubs tucked into them, the Star Tavern and the Grenadier down its cobbled dead end, are about the only places in the neighbourhood where anything happens at street level.