Mayfair - Discovering London

Tag Archive: Mayfair

London Pubs in the 1930s – How Many Can You Name?

Written on March 16, 2012 by Peter Berthoud in Architecture, Food & Drink, Photography

These beautiful photos of London pubs all date from around 1938. These are London pubs as our grandparents and great-grandparents enjoyed them.

Many still look remarkably similar today, over 70 years since these images were captured. How many of them can you identify and locate? The answers can all be found on my new Facebook page. Just follow the link.

Recently I have publishing many other vintage photos of London on Facebook. Along with several more vintage shots of London pubs, there are also albums of London children, dogs, transport, Soho, street scenes, and markets. Most of the images date from the 1930s and I am adding to these incredible albums daily.

You don’t have to be on Facebook to see all the images, or even need to “like” the page for that matter. But of course any “likes” and “shares” would be very much appreciated!

The author of this blog is a qualified and insured City of Westminster Tour Guide who runs unique walking tours and private tours in London, please see tabs for details.

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High Suspense in Mayfair

Written on March 6, 2012 by Peter Berthoud in Architecture, Curiosities, Photography

This is what being a telephone engineer involved in 1930s London:

Suspending a telephone cable between Conduit & Maddox Streets

Twice a year the steel wires which support London’s telephone cables – each cable may hold the lines of thirty subscribers – are inspected. The cables are fastened to the wires by rawhide suspenders, and this man is detaching the thick dark cable from the old wire and fastening it to the new wire, which shows fresh and bright above. This new wire also supports the worker. He sits in a “bo’sns chair” consisting of a board slung by a loop at either end, which is fastened to the wire. Overhead wires are gradually being superseded by underground systems.

There are more vintage photos of London, dogs, street scenes, transport, all sorts, on my Facebook page, to see them all you have to do is “Like” the page and you don’t even need to be sincere to do so!

Contemporary photos are on my Flickr photostream.

The author of this blog is a qualified and insured City of Westminster Tour Guide who runs unique walking tours and private tours in London, please see tabs for details.

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Head Turning Exhibition in Berkeley Square

Written on February 10, 2012 by Peter Berthoud in Exhibitions, Gardens, Sculpture

A stunning new temporary exhibition of recent work by Emily Young has just been installed in Berkeley Square, Mayfair. Six gigantic heads by one of Britain’s, if not the World’s greatest living sculptors.

The heads are enormous, up to two metres tall and weighing as much as four tonnes each. Unlike her giant heads in St Paul’s churchyard, it is possible to get really close to these new works, walk around them, touch them and really appreciate their scale and the sheer craft involved in their production.

At once figurative and abstract, ancient and modern, natural, yet man-made, monumental, yet deeply sensitive, a sense of solid permanence and fleeting transience are poetically combined; these are quite the most interesting and engaging new sculptures I have seen in many years.

Emily Young’s “The Metaphysics of Stone” will run in Berkeley Square, from 7th February – 25 April 2012. During February there is also an exhibition of more new work from the artist at The Fine Art Society in New Bond Street.

You can read more about them and Emily Young at the FAS site or on the artist’s own website. But far better than reading any more, I would suggest that instead, you hop on a tube to Green Park and experience them for yourself.

The author of this blog is a qualified City of Westminster Tour Guide who runs unique walking tours throughout Westminster, see tabs for details.

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Uniquely Enlightened in Mayfair

Written on January 13, 2012 by Peter Berthoud in Architecture, Curiosities

The excellent Londonist recently ran a feature on the Top 10 Lifts In London. I was surprised yesterday to discover yet another, little known but rather interesting, little lift in Mayfair.

This most telegenic of London lifts is in the world famous lecture theatre of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, in Albermarle Street. This lecture theatre hosts, amongst many other things, the Christmas Lectures that are televised globally each year. If you haven’t seen the 2011 series you can do so here.

Source and Copyright with www.worldarchitecturefestival.com

The lift’s mechanism is directly above the lecture theatre’s roof. You can see the ceiling lighting feature in the picture above. Well, directly above that, high on the roof, is this:

This curious structure houses a bespoke Otis lift. Beneath the dust you can see a steel dome.

This dome can be raised a few metres to allow natural light to diffuse into the otherwise windowless lecture theatre. This bespoke piece of apparatus was installed by Otis during the late 1920′s and early 1930′s refurbishment of the Royal Institution. It is believed to be an absolutely unique lift design.

Other bespoke work carried out by Otis at this time included building a lift to raise and lower the windows of the Royal Box at Ascot, thus enabling appropriate adjustments to be made without anyone getting in the way of the racing.

The lift motor hasn’t worked for a while. When the dome needs to be raised staff have to hand crank the mechanism, a process that can take several hours. There is hope that soon an engineer, who is suitably familiar with bespoke lift mechanisms of the 1920′s and 30′s, will be climbing through this tiny entrance hatch to repair the motor.

Good luck to him or her. I got vertigo just taking a photo of it.

There is more to see from the roof of the Royal Institution and I am very grateful for the privilege of being given such rare access but I am also useless with heights and had to stay well away from the edges. This is the only other shot I was brave enough to take.

The author of this blog is a fully qualified and insured City of Westminster Tour Guide. He runs unique walking tours (exclusively at ground level) in London, see tabs for details.