Knightsbridge

The great shops, the barracks and the embassies, on the road along the bottom of Hyde Park.

A bridge gave it the name: a crossing over the Westbourne, the river now dammed to make the Serpentine, on the road west out of London. It was open country with a bad reputation for robbery, and it became a place to shop by accident. Harrods began as a small grocer's in 1849 and grew until it filled a whole block in terracotta, with more than three hundred departments and a food hall of tiled Edwardian ceilings that is worth going in for even if you buy nothing. Harvey Nichols at the top of Sloane Street took the fashion trade, and Sloane Street itself became a run of luxury shops with hardly a break in it. Two other things share the district. The Household Cavalry live in Hyde Park Barracks behind a 33-storey tower by Basil Spence, and their horses come out onto the park in the early morning, which is the best free spectacle in this part of London. And the embassies are here in numbers, because the grand houses were the right size and nobody else could keep them up. It is also the sharp end of London's property market: the flats at One Hyde Park have sold for over a hundred million pounds, and fourteen of the two hundred most expensive streets in Britain are within a few minutes' walk of the tube.