Boodle, Hatfield and Company , solicitors

Periodic bursts of activity in house building had been common in the western suburbs of London since the Restoration. Within a dozen years builders had moved from Hanover Square through the City of London's Conduit Mead estate well into the Grosvenor estate and even north of Oxford Street, in the vicinity of Cavendish Square. On the Grosvenor estate, where development began in 1720, only a handful of houses were occupied before 1725, but in that year the parish ratebooks show many more houses filling up and the new streets on the estate were formally named, an occasion marked by a 'very splendid Entertainment' given by Sir Richard Grosvenor.

The relative stability which followed the Peace of Utrecht and the crushing of the Jacobite rebellion provided a favourable climate in which building developments could be undertaken, and there seems to have been plenty of capital available for mortgages even during the years of the South Sea Bubble. Against this background the decision of the Grosvenor family in 1720 to lay out The Hundred Acres in Mayfair for building is not a particularly remarkable one.

From: 'The Development of the Estate 1720-1785: Introduction', Survey of London: volume 39: The Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair, Part 1 (General History) (1977), pp. 6.