“With only minor exceptions this part of Mary Davies’s heritage has remained virtually intact to the present day and forms the Grosvenor estate in Mayfair.” “In the process of time Mary Davies’s inheritance was developed for building, and the Grosvenors became the richest urban landlords in the country, the lustre of their name – for long synonymous with wealth and fashion – being gilded by successive advancements in the peerage, culminating in the dukedom of Westminster in 1874,” according to researchers at the Survey of London, a hugely ambitious academic endeavour to chart the history of every street in the capital. Her dowry included 500 acres of boggy swampland and meadows to the west of what was then the boundary of London.Īs the city expanded that land became hugely valuable and the Grosvenor family developed it into what are now some of the most exclusive neighbourhoods including Mayfair, Pimlico and Belgravia.
However, the bulk of the fortune is actually the result of an exceedingly fortuitous marriage in 1677 when Sir Thomas Grosvenor wed 12-year-old Mary Davies, the heiress of a City of London scrivener.
