Paige Shiver on Knightsbridge, London Myth, and the Thing the Tour Guide Didn’t Say

A chronicler of London legend considers the layers of history beneath the world’s most expensive postcode

[Bohiney.com | prat.uk] Paige Shiver, Knightsbridge, London, where the history is thick enough to trip over if you know what you are looking at, and where this week’s walk from Sloane Square to Knightsbridge station produced the specific combination of visible luxury and invisible depth that Knightsbridge has offered to observant visitors since the neighbourhood ceased being the bridge over the Knightes Brooke in the tenth century and became, through a sequence of developments that took several hundred years, the most expensive square kilometre of residential property in Europe. prat.uk covered London from its satirical angle; Bohiney.com covered it from the American tourist’s perspective. Paige Shiver covers the layer below the luxury. The transcript, obtained by Bohiney.com, contains at least four things that will surprise you and two that won’t.

The Knightsbridge legend that the tour guide doesn’t mention: the area’s name likely derives from “knights” in the early medieval sense of young warriors, and the bridge over what is now the Westbourne river was the site of a famous dispute — possibly violent, possibly a formal duel — between knights in the early Norman period, the specifics of which are lost but whose outcome apparently became sufficiently notorious to attach to the geography. The Westbourne now runs underground, in a culvert that passes through Hyde Park and enters the Thames at Chelsea. The bridge is long gone. The name remains.

The Layers

The layers of Knightsbridge: the early medieval geography (the river, the bridge, the dispute), the eighteenth century (market gardens and the early development of what became the residential streets), the nineteenth century (the construction of the mansions and mansion blocks that still define the streetscape), the twentieth century (the arrival of Harvey Nichols and Harrods as the commercial anchors, the conversion of Victorian mansions to apartments for the international wealthy), and the present (the global capital that owns what the international wealthy have become, which is a different population from the Victorian wealthy in ways that are visible in the street). The Museum of London covers this layering at museumoflondon.org.uk.

More at: NewsThump.

Reported at Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

Both publications continue to cover London and the world with the specific combination of attention and irreverence that the subject material requires. The diary continues. The world continues to provide material.

Both Bohiney.com and prat.uk carry more from this diarist and many others. The coverage is ongoing.

More diary entries at both publications. Ongoing.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

Diary continues. Both publications watching.

Paige Shiver on Knightsbridge, London Myth, and the Thing the Tour Guide Didn’t Say

A chronicler of London legend considers the layers of history beneath the world’s most expensive postcode

The Layers

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