Terracotta, a duke with opinions, and a street rebuilt in twenty years

The colour of a flowerpot

Walk along Mount Street at the end of a sunny afternoon and the whole street turns the colour of a flowerpot. Almost every building on it, from the hotel at the Carlos Place end to the pub on the corner of South Audley Street, is faced in pink or salmon terracotta and warm red brick, with shops at street level and three or four storeys of flats above. It looks planned because it was planned.

Most London streets are the sum of many owners' decisions over two centuries. Mount Street is very largely the product of one owner's taste over about twenty years, and knowing that turns a few minutes on foot into a short and pleasant lesson in how Mayfair came to look the way it does.

A landlord with opinions

The land belongs to the Grosvenor estate, as a great deal of this part of Mayfair still does. In the late nineteenth century the long leases granted in the eighteenth began to fall in, and Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, the first Duke of Westminster, used the moment to rebuild. He did not simply let each plot to whoever offered most. He approved elevations, sent back designs he disliked and had a strong and well known preference for brick and terracotta in a gabled manner borrowed loosely from Flemish and Queen Anne houses.

Terracotta suited the age. It could be moulded into any ornament an architect could draw, it came out of the kiln in consistent colours, and it shrugged off the soot of a coal burning city far better than stone. The Duke's architects used it for almost everything: window surrounds, panels of fruit and foliage, gables, chimneys, the lettering over the shops. The result is a street that looks carved and was, in fact, very largely cast.

What stood here before

The old Mount Street was a plainer and poorer place, a street of tradesmen and small houses, with the workhouse of St George's parish close behind it. The name is older still, and is usually traced to a Civil War earthwork, a mount thrown up as part of the defences of London in the 1640s. Nothing of the mount survives, and nothing of the workhouse either.

What does survive is the parish's old burial ground behind the south side of the street, which was laid out as a public garden in the same years as the rebuilding. Mount Street Gardens is long and green and lined with benches carrying small memorial plaques, with the Jesuit church on Farm Street opening onto one side and the Grosvenor Chapel standing at its South Audley Street end. A quarter of an hour there is the natural beginning to the walk.

Reading the blocks on the way

Start at the crossing with South Audley Street, where the gunmakers James Purdey and Sons have occupied their building since the early 1880s. It is among the first of the new frontages and shows the style in its early, confident form, with a great deal of red brick and the ornament gathered where it can be seen. At the same crossing The Audley shows what the estate did when it wanted a public house to look respectable: a polished ground floor under the same warm upper storeys as everything else.

Walk east and look above the shop fronts rather than into them. The blocks change subtly as you go: here the terracotta is paler and the gables steeper, there the brick takes over and the ornament retreats to the windows. Different architects designed different stretches, Ernest George and Harold Peto among them, and each worked inside the Duke's rules while doing his best to make his own frontage the one people noticed.

The walk ends at the hotel on the Carlos Place corner, rebuilt in the 1890s under a German name and renamed during the First World War, when that name had become impossible and it took the title of one of Queen Victoria’s sons instead. It is the grandest building on the street and one of the last to go up, and by the time it did, the pink street around it was more or less complete.

An evening booked by two

This walk is one of the easiest ways to begin an evening booked by two, in which a couple would like a third person at dinner and good company for a few hours. The street gives the three of you something to look at before anyone has to make conversation, and a companion who knows the district can point out the details that most people who shop there never lift their eyes to see.

The booking itself is plain. Both guests are named from the very first message; she is told before she agrees that the evening is for two guests; and the fee buys her time and her company and nothing further, at any length. Two hours at £500 covers the walk and a supper. Four hours at £900 covers the walk, the gardens and a long dinner, perhaps at Scott's or upstairs above The Audley, which is described in the note on Mount St. Restaurant. She is handed the fee in person when she arrives, by whichever of you wrote.

Company that looks up

From the petite drawer, Jasmin is the first to ask for. She is small and quick, cares about architecture more than almost anything, and is very good at the first twenty minutes of an evening, which is exactly when a walk like this does its work. Tina knows Mount Street better than anyone on the list, walks to most of her bookings, and will tell you which door of Scott's to use when the front of the room is full.

Lea, who lives in Belgravia, is at her best in small rooms and small groups, which makes her unusually easy company for two guests at once. Any of the three will take the booking. Say which you would prefer, and the day and the hour, and Tamsin will reply with a time.