Mayfair

Grand squares turned into offices, the tailors and galleries between them, and two composers' houses next door to one another.

Named after a fair. The May Fair was held every spring from 1686 in the fields where Shepherd Market is now, and it was suppressed in 1764 for being disreputable, by which time the ground around it was being covered in the most valuable housing in London. That was the Grosvenor family's doing. Sir Thomas Grosvenor married a twelve-year-old heiress in 1677 and with her got five hundred acres of Mayfair and Belgravia; his descendants laid out the grid in the 1720s with Grosvenor Square as its centrepiece and are the Dukes of Westminster today. Berkeley Square went up in the 1730s, and its plane trees, planted in 1789, are among the oldest in London. The aristocracy could not keep the houses up after the First World War, and the district turned commercial: hedge funds and headquarters behind the doorcases, with the shops that served the old residents still there. Savile Row has cut suits since 1803, Bond Street sells art and jewellery, and the Burlington Arcade of 1819 still employs beadles in top hats to stop you whistling in it. Two houses at 23 and 25 Brook Street make the neatest fact in London. Handel lived in one from 1723 and wrote Messiah there; Jimi Hendrix lived in the other in 1968. They are now a single museum, and you can walk from one man's harpsichord to the other man's bedroom in about ten seconds.