A VISION FOR EAST MAYFAIR - WHAT THE REPORT SAYS


IN MANY WAYS, EAST MAYFAIR’S streets embody a certain quality of British understatement. While the area’s renown depends on display, it does not derive from visual ostentation; rather, the area’s character is based on the cultivation of subtle relationships between street and interior, tradition and innovation, making and exhibition. Unfortunately, the appreciation of these subtle relationships is largely undermined by outmoded highways arrangements and the lack of a strategy to manage vehicular uses in the area’s streets. The vision outlined in this document is a design framework, a decision-making tool, and a practical illustration, which demonstrates how comprehensive enhancements to the area’s public realm could look and how they could be achieved.


Over the course of the study undertaken, three principal issues to be addressed emerged:


• The physical quality and condition of existing streetscapes, which do not support the area’s international reputation;


• The arrangement and management of vehicles loading, waiting and parking, as well as the quantity of general traffic moving through the area, resulting in vehicles often dominating the street scene, undermining many of the intrinsic positive qualities of the urban environment;


• Local stakeholders’ desire to use the public realm for collaborations and large-scale events, which is largely discouraged by current highway arrangements and lack of cohesion in the public realm.


28 SAVILE ROW STYLE MAGAZINE


The plan is to add to existing greenery to create a high quality streetscape that supports a mix of uses


At present, East Mayfair is known more


for particular streets and places than as a coherent area in its own right: Savile Row and Cork Street are internationally famous, as are the Royal Academy and the Burlington Arcade. Savile Row is the principal north–south pedestrian route through the area, and this status will be strengthened when Crossrail opens in Hanover Square in 2018. The vision proposes to subtly elaborate on the elegant linear elements of Savile Row, including clarifying its footways, rationalising its street furniture and


revealing the quality of its enclosing buildings, to aid natural wayfinding and to encourage its use as a promenade. The design of the street should


accentuate the pre-existing multifaceted character of the street, with its rows of handsome townhouses, ground floor tailors’ showrooms and lower ground workshops. The street has the potential to become a subtle theatre of high craft within which continues to support the attractive social nature offered by the raised entrances of its shops and the fine-grain scale of its urban fabric.


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