I had always thought of the Duke of Westminster as new money, but this memorial suggests that I was quite wrong. According to a memorial plaque off-snap to the left, the Grosvenors came over with the Conqueror and got lands in Cheshire as their portion. They stayed up there for a five or six hundred years, then one of them came down and married an heiress who happened to own the manor of Ebury, more or less what is now Mayfair, Belgravia and Pimlico. The rest, as they say, is history.
They also brought over some dogs from France called talbots, the stock from which our own bloodhounds have since been bred. Part of the head of one of them can be seen top right.
I might say that I myself once acquired a very satisfactory bed-sit from a newsagent then at the southern corner of the junction of Ebury Street and Eccleston Street, thus proving that even smart areas have the wrong side of the tracks.
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