Escorts in Belgravia, SW1X and SW1W: who is close, and how soon

Mary Davies was an heiress by accident. Her father died young, the manor of Ebury came to her as a child, and at twelve she was married to Sir Thomas Grosvenor, a baronet with land in Cheshire and none at all in London. The manor she brought with her covered the fields between Westminster and the river, and it is the reason a Cheshire family's names sit on half the signs in SW1X.

Building on it came much later and came all at once. The whole district was let on building leases to one contractor rather than sold off in parcels, which is why the plan is so regular and why the terraces answer one another from street to street. It shows at every junction.

A waterworks company cut a channel inland from the Thames here in the 1720s to draw water for the town. A hundred years later the landowner had it rebuilt as a proper navigation, the Grosvenor Canal, opened in 1825, with a basin at its head where barges unloaded coal, timber and building stone brought up off the river.

The basin is the part that matters now. In the 1850s a railway company bought it, filled it in and put its London terminus on top, which is how Victoria station came to stand where boats once turned round. A short length of the cut survived below Grosvenor Road and went on working as a wharf long after the barges stopped. It also explains why the bottom of the zone is railway and works rather than stucco.

One landowner and one scheme produce a district you can cross on foot without a map, and the reason to walk it is the change of scale. Begin among the shop fronts on the southern streets, where the houses are narrow and the pavements busy. Finish where the porches get deep and the plane trees stand behind railings. That closeness is the whole of what Belgravia escorts amounts to on a board like this one.

Victoria is five minutes on foot from the southern end, with the Circle, District and Victoria lines and the main line platforms above them. The hotel addresses in the zone fall into two groups, one at the park end in SW1X and one nearer the terminus in SW1W, and the only thing worth knowing is that they are not the same walk.

North west along the top of the district Knightsbridge begins within a few minutes' walk. The shop windows of Sloane Street run down the western side towards the river end of town. South east past the railway the ground the manor once covered carries on into Pimlico, which the same estate laid out a generation later and which looks it.