Belgravia is the home of huge stucco fronted houses. The area operates as its own separate enclave to a very considerable degree, and much of it is still owned - or at least the ground rents are owned - by the Grosvenor Estate. The Grosvenor Estate rigorously applies uniform standards - cream coloured stucco buildings must be repainted in the official colour. They also tend to ensure that shops and restaurants are clustered together, mainly in Elizabeth Street and Motcombe Street. Belgrave Square is the centrepiece of Thomas Cubitt’s Belgravia. The buildings there are so huge that they are now almost exclusively used as embassies and there are few family houses. Wilton Crescent runs from the northern corner, and many more of the properties there are residential, but mainly flats. Kinnerton Street contains houses on a rather smaller scale, and there are a number of mews and yards off it with flats and cottages.

From a residential point of view, Eaton Square is the centre of Belgravia. It is more like a series of terraces than a square because a large road runs down the middle. But the terraces are built so far back from the road that it doesn’t detract from the beautiful cream buildings. Nearly every property is converted into flats. Chester Square has some of the most attractive houses in the whole area, although they were originally assumed to be less prestigious than Eaton Square. South of Chester Square is definitely a step down as you head towards Buckingham Palace Road and Victoria Station. Apart from the main squares, there are other terraces of very similar quality houses, such as Eaton Terrace and South Eaton Place. Eaton Place between Belgrave Square and Eaton Square is a location for more grand houses.

When Belgravia was constructed, there were no railways and trams, and every household depended on its own horses and carriages. So mews were built behind the huge squares where horses and carriages were housed. One of the attractions of Belgravia today is the considerable number of mews streets with little cottages, often with cobbled streets. There are many mews streets between Belgravia square and Eaton Square. Belgavia stops short of Sloane Street. Lowndes Square at the top is regarded as part of Knightsbridge, and the Cadogan Estate is part of Chelsea.

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.)