PARK LANE Colour group: dark blue Purchase price: £350 Rent: £35 Length: 1200m Borough:Westminster Postcode: W1
The final street on the Monopoly board is Park Lane, a seething dual carriageway that somehow retains a luxury cachet. One side is a wall of superior hideaways and five star hotels, the western edge of Mayfair, while the other is a Royal Park and entirely undeveloped. These facts are not entirely unrelated. Officially it's the A4202 and part of the Inner London Ring Road, a street you can dodge along if you don't fancy paying the Congestion Charge. It's also brilliant for plane-spotting, planes being the default tree brightening its three-quarter-mile passage from Marble Arch down to Hyde Park Corner. Welcome to the dark blues, the board's full-on upmarket finale.
Park Lane reveals its backhistory in its name - it used to be a lane and it ran down the edge of a park. Hyde Park was established by Henry VIII in 1537 as a hunting ground and was opened to the public a century later, separated from the track alongside by a long brick wall. As the neighbourhood of Mayfair expanded in the early 18th century this lane formed a natural barrier to further development, and still does, with aristocrats favouring houses on the neighbourhood's western flank with an unbroken vista across the park. Huge hotels started to replace private homes between the World Wars, then in the early 1960s the current three-lane dual carriageway swallowed up 20 acres of Hyde Park in an attempt to ease traffic congestion. It is thus still Park Lane, except there are now six lanes and there's less park.
Let's walk the built-up side first, starting at the Marble Arch gyratory. Raise your eyes above the tourbus kiosks and gift shops and you'll see the first of the hotels, the London Marriott Hotel Park Lane, which opened in 1919 as a concierged residential complex. If you fancy a room with a view of an advert-shrouded ceremonial arch and the constant roar of traffic it's ideal. The next half dozen properties are private homes, mostly their back gardens shrouded behind a stucco wall, in front of which is the bottleneck of London's busiest bus stop. Ten routes stop here and the single shelter is entirely insufficient to contain the waiting passengers when it's pissing down, as I can confirm from bitter experience was the case at the weekend.
Next comes the first of Park Lane's car dealers, Bob Forstner, who've been selling zhooshed up Mercedes and classic Lamborghinis since 2014. Their mancave is dwarfed by the shiny showroom under Brook House where Aston Martin display their wares, sleek beasts none of which is accompanied by anything as common as a price tag. Biggest of all, however, is the recently-opened BMWflagship further down the street where one end's all Minis and the other's devoted to BMW bikes and cars. Should any local resident choose to seal a deal on a handy runaround, a panoramic 4K screen kicks into action to congratulate them on their purchase. Those less interested in cars may prefer to peruse the green plaque on the side of the showroom which confirms that Dame Anna Neagle and her husband Herbert Wilcox used to live in a flat upstairs.
At number 100 is Dudley House, one of London's few surviving aristocratic townhouses, the aristocrat in question being the Earl of Dudley who started work on it in the 1820s. This portico-ed monster has been much altered since, in one case by the Luftwaffe, its ballroom at one point subdivided into lowly offices. The latest owner is a member of the Qatari royal family, inevitably, who bought the building in 2006 and blinged up the interior so much that the Queen once told her supper host "This place makes Buckingham Palace look rather dull". What you won't find any more two blocks down is Grosvenor House, once home to one of Britain's richest homegrown dynasties, because it proved too lavish to maintain so they knocked it down in the 1920s and built this...
The Grosvenor House Hotel is mammoth and multi-stacked, and cutting edge in its day because it was the first hotel to grant every room its own separate bathroom and entrance lobby. Queen Elizabeth learnt to ice skate here when she was merely a princess living down the road, although the ice rink was closed two years later and converted into The Great Room, a ballroom on a scale large enough to host premier award ceremonies. Officially it's another Marriott, and unsurprisingly a chain of sales over the last couple of decades saw ownership pass from Scotland to India to the USA to (once again) Qatar. At ground level the hotel presents a sawtooth profile to the street, the indentations filled with pristine topiary, and across the street is an unlikely Esso garage and an even more unlikely branch of Londis. On Park Lane!
The next hotel is The Dorchester, built on the site of Dorchester House, which is one of the world's most prestigious places to stay. Its subtly-concave eight storeys were built in just 18 months thanks to a pioneering use of reinforced concrete and opened to guests in 1931. During WW2 Eisenhower directed Allied forces from a suite on the first floor, while downstairs today you'll find Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester, one of only nine London restaurants with three Michelin stars. Out front is a bijou terrace garden centred around a plane tree, ideal for exhaust-choked alfresco cocktails, along with one of those heritage 'Taxi' lamps that lights up when one of the porters wants to summon a cab. That said it's hard to imagine anyone's ever at a loss for a black cab round here because they flock to the south end of Park Lane like ants to a picnic.
More hotels follow including 45 Park Lane, a Bauhaus conversion which includes a ground floor salesroom for corporate jets. TheHilton is one of the West End's rare skyscrapers, a 28 storey tower with unparalleled views whose rooftop restaurant is currently closed awaiting the arrival of a Pan-Asian Dubai concession. Following a number of unfortunate gravity-related incidents at the Hilton over the years, its balcony doors are now securely locked. The final hotel is the boxy InterContinental London Park Lane, built on the site of Queen Elizabeth's childhood home at 145 Piccadilly but which has plumped for a Park Lane address for purely snooty reasons. Normally in Monopoly the houses outnumber the hotels but here on Park Lane it's very much the reverse.
Park Lane's central reservation, if I can call it that, is a broad ribbon of plane trees generally inaccessible to pedestrians unless they choose to ignore a succession of subways. It includes a lot of intriguing statues including a pair of upturned feet and a severed horse's head previously located amid the swirl of Marble Arch. The one everyone stops to look at, because it's alongside the sole set of pedestrian crossings, is the Animals In War memorial. This curved wall of Portland stone was inspired (and part-paid-for) by Dame Jilly Cooper and features two heavily-laden bronze mules alongside the legend "They had no choice". Much more easily missed is Lord Byron's isolated statue at the southern end, a Victorian tribute which used to be in a dignified corner of Hyde Park before East Carriage Drive was rudely converted to the northbound carriageway.
The western side of Park Lane, alongside that very same northbound carriageway, can be generally summarised as a broad parkside pavement alongside a segregated cycle lane. Access to Hyde Park is intermittent, thus you'll likely find yourself amid tourists trying to find their way in, as is especially the case at present with the revels at Winter Wonderland well underway. At the weekend I had to feel sorry for the daytrippers who'd booked an expensive coach trip from the provinces without anticipating Storm Darragh so were piling into Hyde Park under brollies to join lengthy queues at insufficient gates before spending the day in a sodden amusement park wondering whether or not to risk a windswept circuit on one of the outdoor rides.
A ramp leads to the only genuine point of interest on this side of the street which is the massive 981-space car park hidden beneath Hyde Park in the 1960s, and whose excavated earth was then used to build the embankments on the M4 between Brentford and Slough. Vehicles can drive straight in but pedestrian access requires scanning a panel at the entrance to a long Stygian corridor so I decided to defer exploring this underworld for another day. A car park under a park - only on Park Lane.
