Various fashionable thoroughfares traverse Mayfair more or less completely from west to east and from north to south, and these are inter-connected by a network of shorter streets, many of which are no less important in the eyes of 'society.'
CURZON STREET begins on the west at Seamore Place. At the corner of South Audley St. rises Chesterfield House (Viscount Lascelles and Princess Mary), completed in 1750 by Isaac Ware for Lord Chesterfield (died here in 1773), of the 'Letters to his Son,' who brought the marble staircase and the columns of the portico from Canons. Both wings of the house have been removed and the gardens built over, but the library, on which Chesterfield spent special care, remains much as he left it. Bute House, 73 South Audley St., formerly the residence of Lord Bute (1713-92), George III's unpopular minister, is now the Egyptian Legation. At 19 Curzon St. (south side) Lord Beaconsfield died in 1881. Between Chesterfield St. and Queen St., on the north side and pleasantly shaded by trees, is Crewe House, known before its purchase by the Marquis of Crewe in 1899 as Wharncliffe House. Opposite is Sunderland House, on the site of Mayfair or Curzon Chapel, pulled down in 1899. Behind is the congeries of narrow streets clustering round Shepherd Market, a humble quarter contrasting strangely with the fashionable mansions all round.
Within a few yards to the east of Mayfair Chapel (and not to be confounded with it) stood the smaller proprietary chapel of the Reverand Alexander Keith, notorious for the irregular marriages celebrated there at a low fee for many years before it was closed by the Marriage Act of 1753. It was in a very small, comfortable home in Curzon St. that Becky Sharp and her husband practised the art of living on nothing a year. From the east end of Curzon St. a narrow passage, skirting the south side of the gardens of Lansdowne House, debouches on Berkeley St., a little to the south of Berkeley Square.
