Shepherd Market (London) | square, quarter (urban subdivision)

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Shepherd market is a small square and piazza developed in 1735-46 by Edward Shepherd. This tiny little enclave is tucked away between Piccadilly and Curzon Street, in the exclusive borough of Mayfair. Nowadays, Shepherd Market is better known for its chic boutiques, intimate little restaurants and impressive Victorian pubs.

Mayfair itself is named after the infamous fifteen-day fair that took place on the site that is Shepherd Market today, and which was banned in 1708 due to the fair’s revellers’ relentless boisterousness and disorder. A local architect and developer (Edward Shepherd), was commissioned to develop the site after the banning of the fair, and it was completed in the mid 18th century, with paved alleys, a duck pond, and a two-storey market, topped with a theatre. The theatre was opened in the month of May, and attracted a much higher class of visitor than the noisy, unruly fair beforehand.

During the 1920's, Shepherd Market was an ultrafashionable address for some of London's most refined inhabitants, who lived there like characters in a play by Noel Coward, the new West End sensation. The writer Michael Arlen rented rooms opposite The Grapes public house, and used Shepherd Market as the setting for his best-selling 1924 novel “The Green Hat”. The book also went on to become a hit Broadway play and a film starring Greta Garbo.

The village-like area around Shepherd Market still has something of a jaunty reputation. It was round the corner at 9 Curzon Place that Cass Elliot (Mama Cass) of The Mamas and Papas died in July 1974, and, four years later, Keith Moon, drummer with The Who, died of an overdose. Shepherd Market was also where the Tory fraudster and best-selling author, Jeffrey Archer, met the prostitute, Monica Coghlan. And more recently still, it was at the Mirabelle restaurant on Curzon Street where actors Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis spent a cool £17,000 on a meal for two (including £11,000 on a single bottle of burgundy). Emerging from the restaurant, Depp lashed out at the paparazzi and ended up in the local police cells.

Next to Shepherd Market is Half Moon Street, where the fictional Wooster (the perfect upper-class Mayfair resident and his faithful valet Jeeves) of P.G. Wodehouse's novels lived, and where in 1763 the real James Boswell (newly arrived from Edinburgh) took lodgings and wrote his defamatory diary. Curzon Street is home to Crewe House, originally built by Edward Shepherd, but now a company headquarters and one of the few eighteenth-century Mayfair mansions still standing.

www.shepherdmarket.co.uk/