Since co-writing The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook all those years ago, Peter York has struggled to escape being labelled a ‘style guru’. Labels are invariably irksome to the individuals to whom they’re applied and I apologise for mentioning this one. But imagine my excitement: he has moved from fashionable Marylebone to Warwick Square. I don’t say that Warwick Square isn’t fashionable, only not as fashionable as it will surely become after Peter’s arrival. Already, he has organised a lecture on Pimlico to celebrate his adopted neighbourhood.
The downside is that the lecture will be given by me. There’s no getting out of it: our sponsor John D. Wood has distributed leaflets. Better, I thought with incipient panic, take some photographs quick. An autumn sun was reaching slyly into the mews out of which cabmen once drove their carriages towards Victoria, and it threw Thomas Cubitt’s architectural detail into relief.
Actually, the detail isn’t Cubitt, who provided the masterplan but left execution to the builders, each of whom had a slightly different repertoire of window pediments and plaster decoration. Pimlico may not be as splendid as the Nash terraces around Regent’s Park, but the jumble is friendly. Fashion can wait.
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