All the roughly one square mile communities that comprise central London display their own distinctive characters. Belgravia is very wealthy with vast inherited fortunes, together with more recent loads of overseas laundered 'hot money' investments in large houses which often lie empty. Mayfair is similar, offering top hotels and glitzy nightlife, with the added blessing of nearby parks. Hampstead attracts illustrious literary figures and well-known media pundits. Bloomsbury has long been seen as the repository of notable scholars and intellectuals. Knightsbridge accommodates the highest class of shops and hosts many foreign embassies. Soho’s strip clubs and brothels intermingle with a multitude of restaurants and proximity to the West End's theatre land. Chelsea attracts renowned portrait painters and sculptors. The City of London itself has long been a world-leading financial hub, while Westminster remains the epicentre of the UK's political and governmental institutions.
The exception to all of these metropolitan villages is Fitzrovia, lying north of Soho, south of Marylebone, west of Bloomsbury and east of Mayfair. It is much less well-known and identifiable than the others. As Ann Basu writes, it “was designated as an edge-land right from the start”. There are two main reasons – its landscape of buildings is somewhat commonplace and often downright ugly, and it has spawned so many more features than its counterparts, complicating the scene. Basu’s book provides a long-overdue and masterly detailed analysis of the extraordinary amalgam of activities that constituted Fitzrovia in the first half of the twentieth century.
By the turn of the twentieth century its population was growing fast, and this was to be boosted by further, often simultaneous, waves of overseas immigration from mainland Europe. Jews from Russia, Poland, Germany and other parts of the Continent arrived, inter-mingled with other immigrants from Italy, France, Iberia and Ireland. There was a smattering of Japanese (paper lantern makers) and after 1945 a larger contingent of both Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Fitzrovia was one of the largest and most varied immigrant locations in Britain, which reached a peak in 1911.
