The secrets of London by postcode: W (West)

It’s the area that unites James Bond, Rick Wakeman and both Queen Elizabeths. In the first of our series looking at the quirky history and fascinating trivia of London’s postcode areas, we explore the delights to be found in W (West) – everything from fake houses to shaky newsreaders to dukes who are women…

• The BBC News TV studios are mounted on enormous steel springs to prevent the damage that would otherwise be caused by the Bakerloo line, which runs underneath Portland Place, right down the side of New Broadcasting House. Can’t have vibrations from the Tube trains sending Huw Edwards all wobbly, can we? The same problem was faced by the radio studios that used to occupy the basement – you would occasionally hear the trains on air.
• Lancaster Gate (once home to the Football Association) was named after Queen Victoria, as she was the Duke of Lancaster. The reigning monarch always is, irrespective of gender.
• In 1925 Selfridges was the venue for John Logie Baird’s first public demonstration of an early form of television. He used a ventriloquist’s dummy called Stooky Bill, whose brightly-painted face was ideal for the relatively dim images to which TV was then limited.
• The store’s founder, Harry Gordon Selfridge, is credited with coining the expression ‘the customer is always right’, as well as the promotional phrase ‘only x shopping days until Christmas’.
• Bond Street is named after the 17th century property developer Sir Thomas Bond – whose family motto ‘the world is not enough’ (‘orbis non sufficit’) ended up as the title of a film starring Sir Thomas’s namesake, James. This in turn was a reference to the fact that in the novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the College of Arms judges that 007 might be descended from Sir Thomas.
• Take a trip to Leinster Gardens in Bayswater and examine numbers 23 and 24. If you didn’t know their secret, you’d be very unlikely to notice that they are, in fact, completely false frontages. The five-storey constructions – replete with columns, balconies and sash windows – are there purely to disguise the open-cut section of Tube line that runs underneath the road, at right-angles to it. They were built by the company behind the Metropolitan Railway in the 1860s to assuage local residents. The fake houses are maintained by Transport for London to this day.

• While we’re on the Tube, as it were, South Ealing (in W5) is one of only two London Underground stations whose names contain all five vowels. Can you work out the other one? (Clue – it’s in the EC postcode area. Answer below.)
• The Savile Row tailor Huntsman was the inspiration for the Kingsman films. As well as kitting out Edward VIII, Winston Churchill, Laurence Olivier and Charlie Watts, Huntsman have been making suits for movie producer Matthew Vaughn since he was 18. One day during a fitting Vaughn got the idea for a film. Look through the window from the street and you can see that the main room is dominated by two stags’ heads mounted on the wall. These were owned by a client who left them at Huntsman when he went for lunch one day in 1921. He never returned.
• Fancy staying where one of Britain’s most famous essayists used to live? Hazlitt’s hotel takes its name from William, who lived at 6 Frith Street (one of three adjacent houses that the hotel now occupies). Hazlitt died there too, in 1830, his landlady hiding his body under the bed while she showed the room to a potential new tenant. The rooms (all named after Soho figures of the 18th and 19th centuries) maintain period quirks – as the hotel put it, ‘in some rooms it is an uphill walk to bed’. But modern conveniences make your stay luxurious as well as characterful: for instance Jonathan Swift has a 12in shower head (lucky chap). Modern writers who stay here (such Bill Bryson and Seamus Heaney) often leave signed first editions of their works in the library. Sadly the Harry Potter first editions left by J.K. Rowling are now so valuable that they have to be locked away. Rooms from £289; reservations@hazlitts.co.uk.
• Piccadilly gets its name from the ‘pickadil’, the large and ornate lace collar you see in portraits of Elizabeth I, Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake et al. In the early 1600s Robert Baker, who’d made his fortune from the collars, purchased land in the area and built himself a house. It soon became known as Pickadilly Hall, and the street followed suit.
• Mayfair’s name is a reference to the fair that used to be held there every… well, you can guess the month. Founded in 1686, the fair was famed for attractions such as boxing, bull-baiting and (bizarrely) semolina-eating contests. Increasingly unruly (pickpockets and prostitutes abounded), the fair was finally banned in 1764.
• Cordings, the traditional country clothing store on Piccadilly, is part-owned by Eric Clapton. A fan of the store since his teenage days (he would stare longingly at its window displays at night, having missed his last train home), the rock star responded in 2003 when Cordings found itself in financial difficulty. As he put it, if they went out of business, where would he get his tweed jackets?
• If you want your Sunday cooking to extend beyond a traditional English roast, head to Benares on Sunday 23 October. Sameer Taneja, head chef at the Berkeley Square institution, is running a masterclass in Indian cuisine. Between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. he’ll guide you through some of his favourite dishes (current highlights on the restaurant’s menu include tandoori muntjac, baby poussin tikka masala and Lucknowi-style Scottish lobster). Then your friends can join you for lunch afterwards. Class £199 per person, friends joining for lunch £50 per person; events@benaresrestaurant.co.uk.

• The Soho alleyway St Anne’s Court was once home to Trident Studios, where Elton John recorded Candle in the Wind, David Bowie recorded Life on Mars? and Queen recorded their first three albums. It was also where Marc Bolan recorded Get It On. The piano glissando near the beginning was played by a then-unknown Rick Wakeman. When Wakeman pointed out to his friend Bolan that he could have played the part himself (simply by running his finger down the keyboard), Bolan responded that he wanted Wakeman to have the £9 session fee. ‘I’d have just given you the money, but you wouldn’t have accepted it.’
• Round the corner in Frith Street you’ll find Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club. Although famed as a jazz player, Scott was also responsible for the saxophone solos on Lady Madonna by the Beatles and I Missed Again by Phil Collins.
• Queen Elizabeth II’s birth, at 17 Bruton Street, was the last birth of a British monarch to be witnessed by the Home Secretary. This tradition dated back to the ‘warming-pan scandal’ of 1688, when a rumour went round that James II’s son had been stillborn, and that a ‘replacement’ baby had been smuggled into the room in a warming pan. To confirm that possible future monarchs really were of the royal line, all such births were then witnessed by the Home Secretary. Sir William Joynson-Hicks was the man on duty in 1926.

Answer: the other Tube station whose name contains all five vowels is Mansion House.