Belgravia: the home of highway robbers

Belgravia feels like the absolute centre of posh London, and when you drive in a taxi - or as the locals do, in a state coach - through all that ornate stucco it looks like it’s been there forever. But the amazing thing is that for most of London’s history, Belgravia was just open scrubland where people got mugged or murdered if they took a shortcut home from the pub. Nowadays, there’s just one river in London - the Thames - but actually there are a whole series of rivers which got built over, but which still flow along underneath our feet. The Westbourne river flows underneath Belgravia now but in its day it was a reasonable sized river frequented by highwaymen - in fact, a bridge over the Westbourne River was known as Bloody Bridge because of the number of attacks there. Belgravia was originally known as Five Fields, because it was cut into five areas by footpaths.  It was only given its ‘Belgravia’ name when it was developed into a housing estate in the 19th century by the Grosvenor family, who originally came from the small village of Belgrave near Leicester.  

In the 18th century, the only reason decent (or sober) folk would go anywhere near this area was if they were visiting the Duke of Buckingham, who happened to have his house on the edge of it.  This house was later acquired by George III and it became Buckingham ‘Palace’, although Queen Victoria was the first monarch to actually move into it.  In the days before trains and cars, the top people needed to live as close to the court aspossible. Most of the work of constructing the new high-class residential area was done by the most famous developer of Victorian times, Thomas Cubitt, who more or less single-handedly created the stucco-faced streets which exist today. The new inhabitants elbowed out the highway robbers. (Although, depending on your view of the causes of the credit crunch, perhaps the highway robber fraternity never actually moved out, they just became chairmen of banks.)