Photo credit: © 9 Hertford Street
Our Head of Housekeeping Lourdes had the opportunity to sit at the wheel of this fabulous old car on Hertford Street today. Doesn’t she look great!
It put us in mind of the Bright Young Things who, in the 1920s, would drive around Mayfair (no doubt encompassing Hertford Street) on elaborate treasure hunts. The Bright Young Things set included Cecil Beaton, John Betjeman, Diana and Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh.
Evelyn Waugh used his BYT antics as inspiration for his works, basing his lead figure in Brideshead Revisited, Sebastian Flyte, on socialite Stephen Tennant, and using Hertford Street as a location in Vile Bodies.
Nancy Mitford loved the area and was employed at our local bookshop, Heywood Hill, during the Second World War; her outgoing character and good connections secured the shop as one of Mayfair’s best-known centres of the social and literary scene.