We can see two jaunty, absurd and unmistakable hairdos from the middle of the
road. Russell Brand is walking down Marylebone High Street towards Oxford
Street. On the other side, going up past the working clock outside Waitrose,
the PLU’s own supermarket, is Barbara Windsor’s ponytail, the colour of
bleached tow-rope.
That’s how it is there now. One Saturday I saw the Evening Standard’s
restaurant critic, Fay Maschler, and her novelist husband Reg (Fitzrovia),
Griff Rhys Jones (Fitzrovia), Kimberly Quinn (Mayfair) and Tyler Brûlé,
inventor of Wallpaper magazine (local), in the same half hour.
Sometimes it’s like the BBC canteen. Marylebone High Street is a magnet for
the media artigentsia, pulling people from nice neighbouring places who
don’t have such nice shops.
We’ve both — my agent, Anita Land, and I — got form with Marylebone and its
High Street. Anita remembers going to the exotically 1920s-muralled
Pâtisserie Sagne, all Viennesey coffee and cakes, as a treat after her first
trips to the dentist in Harley Street. And she remembers a mass of
showbusiness greats, friends of her father, Leslie Grade, and his two
brothers, who lived in a mews here, a smart flat there. People like Dennis
Selinger, Peter Sellers’s agent, or John Lennon on the corner of my square.
I remember the whole area as an accessible playground from Hampstead. And my
best friend at school lived there, in the Marble Arch Regency square I live
in now. Anita lives in the neighbouring one. I pitched up from South Ken in
1993; Anita arrived about five years later.
The High Street seemed completely local in the 1960s. I thought it was heaven,
better than Heath Street and Hampstead High Street. Sharper, more compact,
more urban. But as the 1960s became the 1970s and I left home for a
Bayswater bedsit and then Chelsea (you had to be there in ‘71), I forgot
about Marylebone and the High Street and it started its slow decline. By the
1980s it was distinctly dim, competed out by the New Islington and the New
Notting Hill (the emerging Clarendon Cross and Ledbury Road), full of old
ladies, charity shops, medical suppliers and not much else, except for the
unstoppable Pâtisserie Sagne. The world had moved west and people talked
about Marylebone as a series of big intersections, an anonymous central
somewhere, on the way to somewhere else. All deeply unfair, because
Marylebone always had been a real village with a long history, which then
became an important proud borough, with the big grids and the grand houses
of Portman Square laid down in the later 18th century.
Marylebone was intended as part of Great Nash London, a parade of orderly
stucco splendour from Buckingham Palace to Regent’s Park. This being London,
not Paris, it never quite happened. Marylebone festered as its inhabitants
grew older and weren’t replaced. It couldn’t be gentrified, since it had
never been prole or Pooter. And the grandees who owned the larger, better
chunks, bounded by Edgware Road, Oxford Street, Marylebone Road and Portland
Place to the north east, the Portman and De Walden families, seemed to have
lost the plot. But in the 1990s everything changed. Young metropolitans who
had been dredging outer North London for cheaper houses started to notice
what was under their noses: fantastically central, lots of good 18th and
19th-century housing stock, great transport connections and cheaper than
Notting Hill.
But what provoked the Marylebone miracle was the De Walden Estate, which was
created by 17th-century toffs, suddenly getting clever and proactive about
Marylebone High Street, seeing that it could be rethought as a distinctive
high street with special shops. The point about Marylebone High Street is
that it’s a proper local high street with all the essentials, the
supermarkets, banks, newsagents, and the rest, but with themes and knobs on.
The themes are foodiness and bookishness. There’s Daunt’s bookshop, with its
Edwardian galleried and stained-glass back room like a miniature of the
great Fifth Avenue bookstores. There’s the Oxfam bookshop that sells fancy
architectural monographs. And there’s deep foodie stuff: the Sunday farmers’
market in the Cramer Street car park, the Ginger Pig butcher next to the
Fromagerie cheese shop, the Conran deli next to The Conran Shop, and Paul
Rothe’s third-generation deli with its pyramid of jam jars in the windows.
Good thinking, of course, since bookiness and foodiness go together in the
other local villages that make up Marylebone High Street’s hinterland, from
Bayswater to Primrose Hill, taking in Hampstead and Little Venice, Fitzrovia
and St John’s Wood. The other cleverness — the knobs on — comes in the way
the De Walden Estate has avoided the clone tenants that have ruined British
high streets over the past 20 years.
They’ve sought out specialists, often with no more than one other branch —
Fromagerie from its cult outpost in Highbury, Skandium, the furniture shop
with its Alvar Aalto originals, from Wigmore Street. Gap came and went, but
agnès b stayed. Links of London replaced a not-quite-for-us euro menswear
place.
We like the lot, but for Anita the Pâtisserie Sagne — now officially the
Pâtisserie Valerie at Sagne — and Lewis & Lewis, the hardware
shop that still finds parts for superannuated small appliances, are crucial.
We’re both on for Daunt’s, where you get launch parties of the kind that
contain Sebastian Faulks and Beryl Bainbridge. We once saw Simon Sebag
Montefiore interview Andrew Roberts there — both Capel & Land
clients — and a few months later Andrew grilling Simon, lovely high-end
historians’ incest. We both like the little furniture shop Century. Anita
loves the light fittings and mid-century mirrors and Perspex obelisks from
Noho upstairs. I like Andrew Weaving’s serious Sixties and Seventies stuff
in the basement. And we’ d both sign any petition to keep the Hellenic
restaurant on its corner between the High Street and Thayer Street.
