Mayfair has always lived a double life. Behind immaculate terraces and discreet doormen, creative experiment has found a foothold. In the 18th century, George Frideric Handel composed oratorios from a townhouse on Brook Street; two centuries later, Jimi Hendrix made a home just next door, filling it with guitars and Portobello Road trinkets. Illustration flourished in South Audley Street, where Hal Hurst sketched for Punch, and impressionist painter Roy Petley captured bucolic calm for Mayfair collectors.
That tradition continues, though you may not notice it from the pavement. For all the boutiques and members’ clubs, Mayfair remains an artists’ quarter of sorts, its studios hidden above shopfronts or tucked into mews. Five of its contemporary residents, different in temperament and method, embody the neighbourhood’s present spirit.
Serena Vellacott
From a drawing room studio above Mount Street, Serena Vellacott paints Mayfair itself—or rather, its reflections. Her series Windows captures the distortions of shop glass and passersby, layered into near-abstraction. The canvases lean, enormous, against gilt panelling.
“I’m not interested in people so much as the way glass reshapes them,” she says, adjusting tulips on a table. “It’s a reminder that the city is always bending us into new forms.”
She arrives by mint-green Vespa, charcoal smudges visible on the handlebars. A recent work began when she glimpsed an umbrella reflected in Bond Street glass. “I went home and painted over a finished canvas that same evening.”
Felix Moreau
In a mews garage, sculptor Felix Moreau works almost exclusively with bicycles—bronze frames and wheels, often cast at heroic scale.
“I grew up in Paris, where the bike is freedom. Bronze makes it permanent,” he explains, rolling a heavy wheel into place.
He cycles everywhere, usually on a bike not made from bronze. He is remembered locally for once blocking Davies Street when a ten-metre bronze bike sculpture was misdelivered. “Londoners were furious, then everyone wanted a selfie with the work. It was my most public exhibition to date.”
Amira D’Souza
Amira makes light tangible. Her installations of fibre optics and salvaged glass transform rooms into shifting tunnels of colour.
Her studio, a Mayfair basement she calls “the bunker,” is crowded with wires and chai mugs. A small black Smart car is her workshop on wheels.
“Light is political,” she says. “We think it’s neutral, but who gets to stand in the spotlight? Who stays in shadow? That’s what I work with.”
One late-night test lit her entire street from 1:30 to 5:00. “I apologised,” she laughs, “but neighbours now ask me when the next ‘light show’ is scheduled.”
Thomas Leland
Where others look outward, Thomas Leland turns to Mayfair’s quieter figures—doormen, waiters, shopkeepers—rendered in warm oils.
“If Mayfair has a soul, it’s in those faces,” he says, seated in his flat above a pub, canvases stacked like barricades.
He drives a dented Mini, though locals more often see him sketching at café tables. The Cat and Hat landlord recalls Leland once leaving a palette on the bar, a customer then mistaking it for a cheese board. “They teased her for weeks,” he admits, “but she liked how the oils caught the light against the pint glasses.”
Lila Cheng
On a rooftop near Grosvenor Square, Lila Cheng tends fragile paper forests. Her sculptures, folded and scorched, explore impermanence and renewal.
“Paper holds memory,” she says softly, smoothing a crease. “When you burn it, the memory doesn’t vanish—it just changes state.”
Her greenhouse studio is alive with origami and plants. She travels by electric bicycle, decorated with paper flowers. During a storm, one of her paper trees blew three streets away and was returned by a neighbour. “It survived intact. I kept it as a reminder: fragility doesn’t mean weakness.”
A Subtle Continuity
What unites these artists is not style but setting. Mayfair, with its combination of seclusion and spectacle, lends itself to discretion. Its residents may speak in bronze, oils, paper or light, but all continue a tradition that includes Handel’s harpsichord and Hendrix’s guitars.
Here, creativity persists not in spectacle but in private acts of making, carried out quietly behind Georgian façades. Mayfair’s art, like its artists, is easy to miss. Perhaps that is part of its allure.