(Editor’s note: After King Charles III’s successful visit to the former American colonies, Westfair Business Journal’s senior writer Jeremy Wayne, who hails from Great Britain, explains how, correspondingly, London has long welcomed visiting America.)
Many Britons living in the United States will have experienced a gentle glow of warmth at the reception their majesties King Charles III and Queen Camilla received in Washington D.C. las week, at the start of their four-day state visit to the United States. It was a visit that took them to New York City and Virginia as well, for celebrations and commemorations linked, ironically enough, to the 250th anniversary of American independence.
Like his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, before him, King Charles always seems to enjoy his visits to the United States. And, since he is barred – as a constitutional monarch – from engaging in any kind of political debate, again like his mother (who famously met all 13 presidents of her reign), the king has been able to maintain equable relationships with presidents and administrations of every stripe.
State visits, with all their pomp and ceremony but also genuine goodwill, seem like a good time to reflect on the so-called “special relationship,” which politics and internecine squabbles keep threatening to destroy. As a Brit who has lived nearly half his life in America, my conclusion is that the special relationship is alive and well.
That’s because the same spirit of recognition and ease flows, as it has always done, in the opposite direction as well. For Americans arriving in London, the city – with its curious Britishisms, its quirky street names, its weird parking rules and, dare I say it, its unpredictable weather – is going to feel different to wherever it is you call home. Nevertheless, it is immediately familiar, both culturally and socially, in a way that the rest of Europe isn’t. Instead, London reveals itself as a place filled with echoes of home – subtle at times, unmistakable at others.
Walk through London and you encounter American touchstones all over. I recently wrote in the Westfair Business Journal about London’s swankiest new hotel, The Chancery Rosewood, located in the former U.S. embassy on Grosvenor Square, It was on Grosvenor Square that the first U.S. minister to the Court of St. James (and the second president of the United States), John Adams, lived from 1785 to ’88, and where Dwight D. Eisenhower, later the 34th American president, set up his military headquarters during World War II.
There is a statue of Eisenhower in the square, as well as statues of presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. The United Kingdom’s 9/11 Memorial is situated in the small garden on the east side of the square. (In Manhattan, Charles and Camilla visited the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, ahead of the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed 67 Britons, more than any other terrorist attack.) And just a couple of hundred yards away, on not-so-pretty Oxford Street, stands the famous Selfridges department store, founded in 1909 by an American, Harry Gordon Selfridge. No wonder the area came to be known as Little America, or the American Quarter.
London hotels have always provided a home away from home for visiting Americans, too. Conrad Hilton didn’t build one, but he did oversee the development of the London Hilton on Park Lane, the first Hilton hotel in the United Kingdom and, for a brief period after it opened in 1963, London’s tallest building. One of America’s richest women, the philanthropist and hotelier Caroline Hunt, scion of the Texas oil family, owned the five-star Lanesborough Hotel in London for 20 years between 1991 and 2011, making it the watering-hole of its day for wealthy Americans. (It still is for many.)
And while you don’t have to be American to visit The Savoy hotel’s American Bar – opened all the way back in 1893 to make its transatlantic visitors welcome and still mixing what many Americans claim is the driest martini in London – American accents abound there, gently reassuring this born Londoner.
London restaurants, inspired by American ones or actually launched by them, have come to define whole areas of London as American.
“The Great American Disaster has struck London,” The New York Times reported in August,1970. “Berkeley coeds, Boston hippies and even the British stand on Fulham Road to push into the tiny, wood‐paneled restaurant that offers Great American Milkshakes, Great American Apple Pie and, of course, the Great American Hamburger. Mia Farrow, André Previn, Warren Beatty and Roman Polanski have already bitten into the hamburgers with relish.”
A year later, the Disaster’s 22-year-old co-founder, Peter Morton, opened the first Hard Rock Café at Hyde Park Corner, where, 55 years later, it is still going strong. (The Disaster eventually became the Texas Lone Star Café, with Boston University and Ithaca College opening London outposts just along the street.)
Up in leafy St. John’s Wood, a tony district just north of Regents Park, sits the American School in London (ASL,) a pre-kindergarten through 12th grade private day school where despite yearly tuition costing $62,000 (for the high school), getting a place is nevertheless extremely difficult, due to the high number of expatriates applying and the school’s high academic bar.
If their pocketbooks can stand it, village-y St John’s Wood, with its handsome brick and stucco houses, is where most American expatriate families in London would like to live, I daresay. But you don’t have to be a permanent resident to take the bus or Tube here from the West End to shop at Panzer – the upscale delicatessen catering to the local expat community and selling hard-to-find American ingredients like Hershey’s chocolate, Pepperidge Farm cookies and crackers and Old Bay seasoning.
Come by cab, though, and you’ll likely drive through Regents Park, where Winfield House is situated. This was “poor little rich girl” Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton’s London mansion, which she sold to the United States government after the Second World War for the token sum of $1. Set back from the road and well-shielded by trees, the house has been the official residence of the United States ambassador to the Court of St. James (as in the United Kingdom) since 1955. Although closed to the public, the grand house nevertheless imbues this part of the vast, beautiful park with a kind of American flavor. In other words, it feels good just to know Winfield House is here.
From T.S. Eliot to Henry James, famous Americans have always enjoyed setting up home in London.
It’s been a particular haven for American music stars. “Mama” Cass Elliot lived (and died) in London; ditto Jimi Hendrix. Paul Simon lived in London in the mid-1960s. Madonna and John Legend call London home. And Bob Dylan currently lives in Crouch End – a modest suburb of North London. (To put this in context, the equivalent might be Mick Jagger, who lives primarily in Manhattan, moving to a small townhouse in Tuckahoe.)
One particular American who actually might not receive a rapturous welcome should she choose to return to her husband’s native city, is the former Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, now living with said husband, Prince Harry, and children in Montecito, California. But never say never, because she may yet be back, and I’ve no doubt that in time the easy-going Brits would warm to her again – well, quite a lot of time, if I’m being honest. (And don’t even get me started on the Peltz–Beckhams.)
But to conclude, I would say London offers Americans a quiet reassurance: Come here, and you will not feel entirely abroad. The city reflects back a familiar identity, refracted through what’s left of British tradition, yet unmistakably American in its presence.
And, just as Washington opened its arms to a visiting king, London, in its own way, continues to extend its standing welcome to American visitors – proud to have them explore a city where their own story has long been part of the landscape.
