Civilisation and Exclusivity - Mayfair

The government talks about creating a society where everyone is included. You visit Mayfair and you realise they are talking shit. For in one of the wealthiest areas of London the social policy is clearly one of exclusion.

Humans are rats. We compete with each other for money, power, sex, food and accommodation. But more than rats we make a pastime out of and take considerable pleasure from basking in our relative strength and dominance. Mayfair knows this, and has created itself as the place for people to celebrate their relative dominance over the rest of mankind.

This celebration of power is encapsulated in the term ‘exclusivity’. Almost anything you ever read about Mayfair will celebrate its exclusiveness. The Curzon Cinema for example advertises its royal boxes which they say ‘add that touch of sophistication and exclusivity that will help your event sparkle.’ The Chesterfield, a hotel in Mayfair, wrote, “Mayfair has a cachet that the rest of London cannot match. No other London address is as smart; no other area offers so much exclusive shopping.” There’s even a dry cleaners that claims it is ‘exclusive’.

It is clear that the rich indulge in Mayfair not because it is in any sense the best place in London, i.e. the most aesthetically pleasing, with the best architecture and food. It is plainly not. Mayfair lacks character, friendliness, charm and warmth. Mayfair is like a temple which those who have appropriated the wealth of the common man through violence and deceit, come to worship the God of greed and dominance. We should rise up and raise Mayfair to the ground. Mayfair and all its nefarious denizens and activities are the quintessential celebratory shout of joy of the winners of the rat race.

The celebration of exclusivity is in actual fact the workshop of absolute power, control and domination.

I can't help but feel that there is an emotional and immoral equivalence, between a Nazi soldier who might of ridiculed a Jew, with a rapist who laughs in the face of his victim whilst thrusting himself in her, with the people who somehow feel above the rest of the human race, shopping in 'exclusive, decadent, luxuriant' paying a sum of money for a bracelet that would keep hundreds of people alive for a year - and who secretly, because they know that by the choice they make people are dying, revel in the fact that they are not making it.

For the common man, the plethora of exclusive bars, intimidating looks from boutique owners, private members only bars, and extortionate prices – all add up to a kick in the balls.

Attention Seeking in Mayfair

To be included in Mayfair’s exclusive environs means you rights and abilities to access materials and people – their labour, their attentions and their bodies – in a way that others don’t. To consume in Mayfair is to be the ‘superhuman’ to whom others sacrifice their blood, sweat, tears and flesh. It is to gorge oneself on the fat of the land, spluttering and drowning in it, rejoicing most when one is squandering what would be manna from heaven to others. To be able to insult the common man in this way gives the rich man a great sense of pride. It’s the same kind of feeling a businessman gets when a young Eastern European prostitute is sucking his dick.

Giorgio Armani, the wealthy clothes designer, who is looking to introduce ‘mens couture’ (the concept of tailor made clothes) to London, understands perfectly that those in the highest social positions, demand a level of attention to their needs, that others should cannot expect. It is the role of Mayfair and all those who work in it to meet those needs and to celebrate it. Armani said, “Men need couture just as women do — something made exclusively for them to define their social position…The new breed of the super-wealthy are also clamouring for a personalised wardrobe… There is a certain client that refuses to lower himself to going into a store and picking something off a rack.”

Alan Cooper of Welsh & Jefferies' a bespoke tailor was quoted as saying "We work for the captains of industry… The major City people come here. Worldwide forces. The old, solid Establishment. The landowners."

Collusion, Privacy and Gluttony in Mayfair

The privacy enjoyed by the super rich allows them to indulge in prostitutes, gorge themselves on illicit drugs and gamble immoral amounts of money with impunity. You learn from what you see and hear in Mayfair that civilisation is not so much moral standards consistent with the beliefs of the elite, but instead a social and ideological imposition which stops us from wanting to enjoy the excesses enjoyed by the rich. That is to say, the rich support the state and establishment, which sets the moral tone for us to live by, but then being above the law completely eschew those very same laws; not out a conscious disrespect for the laws, but because they never believed in them in the first place, at least not beyond using them as an effective tool to control the masses.

The Arabs love the exclusivity of Mayfair – the relative privacy of the clubs, with their intimate spaces and lounges for very special guests, and the exclusive apartments rented out by the Arabs, allow them the space and time they need to gorge themselves on the riches of the lands which they come from – without those same people ever finding out.

Mayfair is the place where murky governmental fake-fronted businesses use slush funds to keep embassy staff and contractor middle-men happy. Edward Cunningham, a Labour Party politician, used Mayfair as a base for a front company, to deploy a British Aerospace slush fund to keep junior members of the Saudi part of an arms deal happy. Cunningham settled gambling bills; arranged prostitutes for Saudis; in return for a ready supply of visas for BAe staff visiting Saudi Arabia on BAe business. Cunningham reported that canteens of gold or silver cutlery which retailed at around £1,000 each were popular gifts; with embassy staff refusing silver (BBC Press Office, 2004).

Mayfair is where the rule-makers live, and the great thing about being able to make rules is that you rarely have to follow them yourself.

Excluding Eyes: The Mechanics of Exclusivity in Bond Street and Mayfair

If Oxford Street is shopping for your middle classes and for your common man with credit card then Bond Street, which is a side street off Oxford Street, is shopping for your toffee nosed elites. From time to time you’ll see an aristocrat with a public school boy scarf wrapped around his neck, loitering by the doorway of a boutique, looking anxious with a frightful look of horror on his face whenever a commoner gets too close to his camel hair garden, and other times with the curiosity of a child wondering whether it would be safe for him to venture into the street unaccompanied by his minders.

Walking around Bond Street you cannot help notice how the shopkeepers eyes survey you, sussing you out, trying to guess the size of your bank balance. Each shop usually has two or three member of staff usually of immaculate physical design, posing like models, dressed to impress, elegant, serious and business like. Invariably they are stood in an array which makes you think they are about to embark on an entry for the Eurovision song contest, their combined analytical gaze is focused on anyone who should dare look through their shop window, let alone walk through the front door.

You know that as soon as you enter the shop you will be approached and interrogated, in a civil British way (unless it’s a French store) which immediately tests out your purchasing power and intention.

The jewellers are the most intimidating, often with one to three hard men, stood outside the shop. These guys are usually dressed in big black coats, and stood with right hand on left wrist. They have cold emotionless stares, either directed straight at you or into space. When it’s the latter you imagine that they’re replaying some grizzly task they were given the night before. Or maybe it’s just a way of hiding the fear that increments over the years of having to act as the first line of defence against a violent attack. I imagine its quite an effective deterrent to any would-be burglar but also to anyone who doesn't feel a million dollars.

You cannot go into a Savile Row tailor without feeling like you’re entering someone’s living room.

Offending Wannabees in Mayfair: Your Shame Is My Erection

The internet is full of people complaining about the obnoxious treatment they receive at the hands of bar staff and doormen in Mayfair’s exclusive district.

The people making these complaints don’t seem to understand. For example, in March 2007, an internet reviewer who had attended a club called Sketch complained that as he left the building the door man said, "thank you will you be needing the night bus home". The reviewer said that they would not be returning given the doormen, ‘don't know how to treat people [properly]’. The reviewer is making a mistake thinking that the comment was the function of a bad mannered doorman. What he or she doesn’t understand is that it is part of a culture which seeks to keep the ‘wannabees’ out; but also an ceremony of exclusivity; whereby the disgrace and shame is carried out for the benefit and amusement of the included.

The myth of the importance of Mayfair and Park Lane

Expensive and grand Mayfair is, but beautiful and interesting it is not. There is nothing idyllic about Mayfair and yet one of the greatest myths perpetrated by the international hotels and their media circus, is the idea that Mayfair is ‘where it is’. The London Metropolitan website claims ‘From floor-to-ceiling windows, look out over a glittering skyline, comfortable in the knowledge you are standing right where it matters’. It adds that the Metropolitan is … ‘squarely on the map of travellers seeking to be at the centre of the action’. These must be travellers who have left their double glazed glasses at home – the Metropolitan is far from the centre of action.

Matthew Norman has called Park Lane ‘a charmless avenue’ and he is quite right. Park Lane is nothing more than a dirty busy road, that does admittedly look out over Hyde Park, but which is otherwise bordered by a collection of dull grey tower block hotels. The London Hilton from the outside looks positively Council estate.

Mayfair and the Sex Industry

Mayfair is famous for its sex industry, which in its heyday was based in the village like Shepherd Market in southwest Mayfair. Many of the brothels were based in properties owned by Harrow School, which Jim White (1996) points out, meant that the education of Winston Churchill, who attended Harrow, was based partly on the proceeds of the sex industry.

The sex industry in Mayfair as in most of London got a boost during the latter part of the second world war with an influx of American GIs into the UK. According to Hudson (2005) Mayfair was full of ‘elegant women in furs await officer clientele’. Hudson also quoted from a Canadian soldier who spoke of a “huge battlefield of sex” in Hyde and Green Parks the night before he and his fellow soldiers were due to be sent out to a battle that many feared they would never return from.

White (1996) claims that in the seventies Shepherds Market was full of drinkers and streetwalkers all looking for a piece of the action. It would seem like the sex industry is still alive and well in Mayfair. In 2006, Thanh Hue Thi and Mee Yoke Pang were jailed for luring hundreds of women from Malaysia to work in bordellos, one of which was based in rented luxury property in Mayfair. They would force the women to work 10-hour shifts as prostitutes before taking the majority of their fees from them. The women would be used to service the sexual gratification of fifty customers a week. Can you imagine what its like to have fifty different men, many of them on drug fuelled power trips smashing their cocks into your vagina, minute after minute, hour after hour, week after week? A woman’s vagina must loose all its sense after a whole. The organisers of this racket earned two million pounds over a 17 month period (LSE, 2006).

Naked Power

As you walk around Mayfair and you take in the big casinos, international hotels, private members clubs and embassies with their police guards, you get the feeling of honing in on the real power. You also get the feeling that if you transgressed someone in and around Mayfair, the normal recourse for the person you transgressed would not be the courts, for the normal rules don’t apply to the people who have the luxury of making them.

Walking around Mayfair brings about countless suspicious looks whether its from policemen guarding the embassies of some of the most powerful terrorising nations on earth; or the doormen and bouncers of various casinos, high class hotels, jewellers or boutiques. This is all part of their campaign to depress the common man, to make them feel not good enough, not important enough, or to remind them of the fate that will become them if they should challenge the power on display.

You realise, when you hear stories of Saudi playboys keeping prostitutes locked away in their penthouse suites, and famous actors and singers being jailed for one week for possession of class A drugs, and embassy staff free to go around transgressing the laws of the land; that there really is one set of rules for one, the common man, and no rules for the others. You realise that the complex set of beliefs that most of us hold about manners, respect, politeness and honest hard thrift, are all part of an ideological web, the powers that be want us to believe are for the benefit of everyone, but which are in fact to stop us from challenging their power and dominance. Civilised world? Walking around Mayfair you begin to get a taste for the naked aggression, which only the super powerful are able to deploy. Walking round Mayfair you begin to get a sense of how animalistic humans are.

The US Embassy and Grosvenor Square

One of the most powerful tenants in Mayfair is the United States, which built an embassy in front of Grosvenor Square in 1960. The square itself hosted General Eisenhower who co-ordinated the Allies military campaign against Germany during World War II. In 1947 a statue of President Franklin D. Roosevelt was erected.

The embassy, is brutal and powerful. In some ways it looks like a gigantic concrete shed, and in other ways it perfectly symbolises the murky American power that raps its tentacles around this earth. The embassy has nine floors, three of which are underground.

According to the Guardian the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone called the head of the US embassy a ‘chiselling little crook’ for refusing to pay more than two million pounds in unpaid congestion charges and other traffic payments racked up by his embassy. The US believe they are exempt from the congestion charge because they believe it to be a tax and they are exempt form paying taxes under the Vienna Convention. However the congestion charge is not a tax. This is more evidence of how Mayfair is full of super rich and super powerful people who think that the laws of the land don’t apply to them, and you know what, in practice they don’t.

On September 11th 2001, the day that the World Trade Centres in New York were bombed, people in London entered Grosvenor Square in their thousands to show their respects. US ambassador William Farish has been reported as saying, “They came to offer help, to leave messages and to present tokens of sympathy and solidarity."

The Embassies

The Saudi Embassy has two policemen guarding it. One is stationed at the front of the embassy on busy Curzon Street. He walks back and forth outside the embassy gates on an elevated gravel surface. The other stands solemnly outside the backdoor.

One late cold January morning I found myself on Curzon Street home of the Saudi embassy. I thought the Saudi Embassy would be a welcome addition to Ravish London. I noticed the policeman strolling up and down and thought it would be good to get a photo of him from a distance. So from the other side of the street I crouched down and zoomed in on him.

As I tried to hone in on him with my viewfinder I realised that he had seen me and not only that was trying to avoid my focus by scuttling behind a tree. I took the photograph but a little put off by his quick movements, my hand juddered, and all I ended up with was the tree which he hid behind with a bit of the embassy behind that.

I then approached the embassy, near to the tree, and took a second photograph of one of the emblems emblazoned on to the gates. The policeman appeared from behind the tree and asked me if I could make that my last photograph.

I asked him if he was ordering me not to take anymore photographs or requesting it of me. This clearly made him irate, as with all authority figures who are scared of where reasoning might take them, and he told me that it would be better for me if I just took my camera and walked away. His avoidance of my question was an insult.

I asked him what authority he had to stop me from taking a photograph. He said that he was simply telling me that I should take no more photographs and that I should do as he says. I asked if I was not within my rights to just stand and look at the building. He told me that I needed to be careful, that in the present climate, it would be preferable if I did not stand looking at the Saudi embassy taking photographs of it.

I exercised my right of standing and looking at the building, only he decided to stand in my way. I told him I was taking photographs for a guide to London. He said ‘don’t you think there are already too many guides to London?’ It was a good point, but then none of the guides were like what mine was going to be, none of them had encounters like this in. The policeman then reminded me that there were other buildings I could take photographs of.

He warned me that if I took another photograph he would apprehend me and I could be detained under suspicion of terrorism. I put it to him that if I were a jihadi terrorist I would not approach the Saudi embassy with a huge camera, debating civil liberties with him.

He told me that there was no reason why a terrorist might not exhibit the type of 'idiotic behaviour' I was showing (his opinion). I told him my behaviour was not idiotic, but that I was just exercising my rights, and that he was not being honest with me.

I asked him how many days he and his police friends could detain me for. 'Don't you read the papers?' he says. Yes but I don't pay too much notice to the detail. Well try 72 days. He tells me I am wasting his time and that I am annoying him.’ He looks into my eyes. I think if we were in Brazil he’d have probably given me a sharp blow to the head with the back of a pistol, and have been kicking the shit out of me by now. I start thinking of the reputation of the Metropolitan Police and remember one occasion when a guy I knew told me he had been bundled into the back of the police van and had the shit kicked out of him.

The policeman also told me that I was boring him. And yet you seem to enjoy talking to me I told him. He gave me a bitter glance, looked away and then shook his head in disgust.

’You’re creating a scene’ he told me, referring to the one embassy staff, who was stood behind the gates chatting into her walky talky, who had been there before I had arrive. 'Have you got your cameras on him?' asked the policeman. She nodded. So I couldn’t take photographs of the embassy but…

The policeman and I stopped talking, like two lovers out on a first date who have run out of things to say. A kiss was out of the question but I did want to look at the embassy. The policeman was stood in front of me and was much taller, not least because he was stood on this elevated platform. He stared at me. I stared at him albeit a little nervously. I asked him if I could stand on the elevated ground he was standing on. He pointed out that it was private property and at the same time expressed glee at the prospect of being able to arrest me for trespassing on private property.

I moved towards the elevated area and he took in a sharp intake of air. He was just about to grab hold of me when I pointed out that whilst very close, there were still millimetres of air separating my shoe from the private property which I had no intention of trespassing on.

I told the policeman I wanted to look at the embassy unimpeded. Earlier on he had told me he would not impede my view if I wanted to look at the embassy. But now he was staring me in the eyes. I took a step to the right to avoid his view. He took a step to his left to impede it. We moved like this, in what a passer-by might have misconstrued as an elaborate mating ritual, until we reached the famous tree.

I stepped to the right, he stepped to his left, I stepped to the right, but he couldn’t go any further because the tree was in the way, so he had to go behind the tree. Now I could look at the embassy impeded by the tree, but unimpeded by the policeman.

What was going to happen next was anyone’s guess. The tree was probably thinking ‘leave me out of this’. I waited and then took a further step to the right, naturally joined by my partner. I then took him out on to the far right of the platform, which meant he left me a good view of the embassy. I took an unusual interest in the fine detail of the embassy, using its white surface as an object of meditation. Then I wandered off to take photographs of the next building.

Later on I unwittingly found myself walking past the back entrance of the same embassy, where another officer was stationed. I am pretty sure my physical appearance had been communicated to him, because when he saw me he had the faintest of smiles, because he knew I was no threat, tinged with a minute amount of anxiety because you never know. He looked at me with an air of all knowing all powerful smugness. I didn't care to look at him much, but I did notice his eyes following me down the street.

Later on in the day I came across the American Embassy. The American embassy looks like a fortress with various surrounding streets closed off and barriers being mounted all the way around it. As I walked up Grosvenor Street on its south side, I saw the meanest looking police officer with an enormous machine gun (I am no gun expert so I could be wrong – but whichever department this officer was lacking in the gun certainly compensated for it).

The officer only had eyes for me – I thought about penning a love song at that point – as he followed me around the barrier from the inside of the compound. That afternoon I was feeling quite intimidated after my tête-à-tête with the Saudi officer, with slightly paranoid thoughts of being ‘dealt with’ by the Metropolitan police occupying my thoughts. I resolved not to take any photographs of the American embassy. However I later changed my mind, and from some distance on a street corner I took one photograph.

I then walked around Grosvenor Square, which sits in front of the Embassy, took a few photographs of the park, and then sat on a park bench with my back to the Embassy. I then stood up walked across to a bench which was facing the embassy. I was sat some hundred metres from the embassy but could nevertheless discern an officer staring at me. Surely he was thinking ‘It must be a terrorist! It must be a terrorist! Oh joy! Hours of standing here watching people has finally paid off’ I took another photograph.

Ten minutes later I decided that I had had enough of the American embassy. I got up and left and was heading northwards when a police car approaching slowly in the opposite direction let out one officer about five metres in front of me and then drove up to my side. The officer on the street approached me and asked me to take my hands out of my pockets. I did. Two more officers pulled up on motorbikes in haste, and I heard the officer who was driving the car, but who had now gotten out, talking to his colleagues on a walky talky. They were asking him if he needed further assistance. He didn't. At four policemen to one me I didn't think he did either.

The two officers on the bike left and the officer who had originally approached me informed me that the American Embassy had spotted me taking photographs and that this was enough for the police to apprehend me under some act or section of an act to do with terrorism. Basically they needed to check my camera. They took all my details, which the officer who had approached me in the car told me was for my own benefit, so that I could have a record of what happened to me (one of the details was about scars etc - which I felt was not information I was likely to forget at a later date so that I needed a record of it then). The officer checking my photos was getting tired flicking through the images on the camera, as there were 360 odd, and many of them weren't very good. He engaged me in light conversation about the architectural wonders of London. I was nervous, feeling kind of sick. Eventually he handed me back the camera, I shook his hand, which he seemed reticent to do, and I went on my way.

Organised Crime in the 1960s

According to Phillip Jenkins and Gary Potter (1986), Mayfair was the scene of a battle between two organised crime groups in the 1960s. This occurred when the Krays took an interest in establishing ‘gambling junkets’ for Americans in Mayfair, where another group called the Richardsons had a strong presence. The conflict led to six murders, to which police responded by launching a campaign leading to the conviction and imprisonment of the major gang leaders.

Quieter spots in Mayfair

Mayfair is pretty well built up and whilst it is close to Hyde, Regents and Green Park it has no big parks set within it, and most those spaces that do exist are not particularly relaxed places to be.

Arguably the best place to go to in Mayfair for a bit of peace is Mount Street Gardens, built in 1880 on an old burial ground. The gardens are located in northwest Mayfair bounded by the walls of various six-storey terraces of red brick Georgian flats. The gardens are striated with several long rows of benches, which give an abstract artistic element to the gardens. Each bench is in memory of a former lover of the park. I couldn't help but laugh when I saw one of the benches was dedicated to a Hawaiian called 'Herb Gardner'. If you sit down you can hear a wind chime, a random gentle noise, may be it's something in the church.

Links

• White, J. (1996) A mosque in Mayfair? That's rich, The Independent, March 14th 1996.
• Davidson, M. (1999) What price a slice of vice?, The Daily Telegraph, September 4th 1999.
• BBC (2002) Reviving the Mayfair Game, BBC, 30th April 2002.
• Hudson, C. (2005) Sex please – we’re British, Times Online, December 11th 2005.
• LSE (2006) Two million pound a year sex traffickers jailed, 3rd November 2006.
• BBC lifts the lid on secret BAe slush fund, BBC Press Office, 4th October 2004.
• Jenkins, P. and Potter, G. (1986) Organized Crime in London: A Comparative Perspective, Corruption and Reform, Vol. 1, No. 3, 165-187.