Around Town

James Bond and Ian Fleming are joined at the hip. Fleming, born 100 years ago on May 28 1908 in Mayfair, was action man to the marrow. At Eton he excelled at throwing, running and kicking. He became an ace hurdler and idolised his dead dad, Valentine, a WWI hero and friend of Churchill who was killed on the Western Front. But Fleming failed his father’s sacred memory by flunking out of Sandhurst, ‘because of the ladies’.

Fleming worked for a time with the stockbrokers Rowe and Pitman before ultimately becoming a journalist and writer. The family connections soon elevated him through the middle ranks of Reuters, and helped again when war returned in 1939. He become aide-de-camp to Britain’s spymaster general, Admiral Godfrey, director of Naval Intelligence.
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Fleming had a good war, all covert ops and sabotage, deploying his own crack commando unit to drop behind Hitler’s front line, for safe-breaking purposes. Fleming called his men his ‘Red Indians’. They considered him a pretty-boy junior officer who had managed to get his claws into a handy admiral.

Getting the picture? Ladies’ man, extremely well connected, private income, passionate about Bentleys, up to his neck in spies and exciting behind-the-lines escapades…

Fleming’s description of his James Bond creation was ‘a healthy, violent man in his mid-thirties’. By the time he came to roll that first page of hand-crafted vellum paper into his typewriter, Fleming was in his mid-forties. Bond was a middle-aged bloke’s wish fulfilment, as he has been for millions of men for the past half-century.

My walking tour of Fleming/Bond’s Mayfair and St James’s covers the writer’s place of birth, his wartime club, his favourite luxury-car dealer and the casino that inspired the famous opening sentence of the first James Bond novel: ‘The scent and smoke of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.’ This is a world of handmade shoes and hats and exclusive gentlemen’s clubs – all very much still with us. The walk also touches on latter-day spies such as Alexander Litvinenko.

The star of the tour, though, is Mayfair itself. The area wears its wealth quietly. We often have the streets to ourselves; a major excitement will be the arrival of a black cab, disgorging some suited type who immediately disappears into a doorway. It was ever thus. In the late nineteenth century, having a family member bed-ridden would mean the footman being dispatched to spread hay from the stables on to the pavement beneath the invalid’s window, to deaden the footfalls of passers-by. Tranquil public space is a Mayfair feature, so too are the delightful mews-side pubs: check out The Punch Bowl in Farm Street, the Red Lion in Waverton Street, and the splendidly monikered The Only Running Footman in Charles Street. All were built to encourage senior male servants of quality into the area: the toffs never went near such places.
London Blue Badge guide Simon Rodway (07720 715 295) offers his ‘James Bond’s Mayfair’ walking tour for private booking. £120 per group.

Take the 007 tour
Walk south from Marble Arch tube, down Park Lane, and turn left into Green Street. No 27 was Fleming’s birthplace and his home for a short time before the family decamped to Hampstead.

Turn right into North Audley Street and cross Grosvenor Square. Fleming’s grandfather Robert – the inventor of the unit trust – owned a mansion on the west side of the Square, now occupied by the US Embassy.

Walk down upmarket shopping street South Audley Street (‘Mayfair’s other high street’), left into the Mount Street Gardens (originally a cemetery for St George’s Hanover Square and the now vanished Mayfair poor house). Cross into Waverton Street and left into Hill Street – Fleming’s wartime club, The Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, ‘the wavy navy’, is on your left.

Continue to Berkeley Square, site of Jack Barclay’s grandiose Bentley showroom, then go along Berkeley Street where, at No 13 is The Fleming Collection, the best collection of Scottish art in private hands and open to the public. From Berkeley Street turn left into Piccadilly and right down St James’s Street into Super Luxury Central.

Fleming’s post-war club was Whites, the majestic building with the black balcony on your left, while nearby on the western side is the old St James Casino, which inspired the opening words of ‘Casino Royale’. Head down St James’s Street admiring all the gent’s outfitters, with the old St James’s Palace at the bottom (1530s with eighteenth-century additions).

End your stroll by crossing over to St James’s Place and left into the courtyard of Dukes Hotel. Here, reputedly, Sean Connery came in 1962 and Pierce Brosnan in 1995 to celebrate their respective landings of the Bond film role with a dry Martini – shaken not stirred. The hotel bar should welcome you daily from 12noon to 11pm (dress code: smart casual, though these days they will ask you to leave the .25 Beretta with the concierge)