My Knightsbridge: Helen Brocklebank

I spent all my teenage years dreaming about the glamour of London, and Knightsbridge in particular, through the lens of glossy magazines. In my head, Princess Diana was constantly going in and out of San Lorenzo, trailing coloured silk scarves and expensive scent, and Mick [Jagger] and Jerry [Hall] and Bryan [Ferry] were dancing in and out of boutiques and restaurants and shopping in Harrods. 

I first came to Knightsbridge by night and I remember seeing the whole place lit up like a fairyland. The magical quality it seemed to have then has never really faded in the subsequent 30 years. Knightsbridge has always been about the best – about luxury and sophistication and glamour – and when I later worked at Harper’s Bazaar, Knightsbridge played a leading role for that reason.

When I started working in London, it was the era of big, glam advertising campaigns created in ad agencies like Lowe Howard-Spink in its offices at Bowater House – now One Hyde Park. I was lucky enough to have a job which involved taking people from Lowe Howard-Spink to long lunches at then-legendary restaurants like Scalini or San Lorenzo, where I had a ringside seat gawping at the shiny, wealthy, powerful business set, or at the celebs that Frank Lowe persuaded to star in his commercials.

It represents the true high-water mark of British luxury: Rolls-Royces, the discerning and well-heeled shopping in iconic luxury stores and staying at the Mandarin Oriental. Here you really see the mega allure of London – and by extension, the UK – for the high-end visitor, drawn to Knightsbridge for the tight edit of the best shops, restaurants and hotels as well as amazing culture. It’s a whole scene. It’s interesting, because we tend to talk a lot about craftsmanship as a defining character of British luxury, but there is glamour too, and that is captured by Knightsbridge. That has never waned and is now really coming into its own.

It has a lot to do with the restaurant scene. Twenty years ago, nobody would talk about the food in Britain. One of the surprise findings of a study into High End Tourism we commissioned last summer from Bain & Company, the management consultants, was that 43 per cent of affluent international travellers said they came to the UK for its gastronomy. The concentration of Michelin-starred restaurants in Knightsbridge is very, very high. You’ve got Heston Blumenthal, Gordon Ramsay and Marcus Wareing in the area, and Harrods has seven Michelin-starred chefs under its roof. It’s just opened Swedish chef Björn Frantzén’s Studio Frantzén: if you’re in a betting frame of mind, it’s worth backing that for a Michelin star of its own. The excellent food and drink offer is just an expression of the super-concentrated element of luxury in Knightsbridge, for locals and visitors alike. Knightsbridge showcases why Britain is the strongest luxury economy in the world and why London is the luxury capital of the world. 

The Aubrey bar underneath the Mandarin Oriental is cool and sexy and beautiful. Named for the 19th-century artist Aubrey Beardsley, whose decadent work was influenced by Japanese woodcuts, it’s a Japanese bar full of nooks and crannies. It translates the spirit of the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements for today, expressing the aesthetic through a contemporary lens. There are great drinks and extraordinary cocktails, and my tip is to go early and have an amazing bento box and soak up the atmosphere, as perfect for a relaxed business meeting as it is for a date. Later, there’s a DJ booth for when things start hotting up. It really is a hidden enclave, glam and sophisticated. Haute hedonism! There’s also a tiny bar at The Berkeley that is tucked away and very chic – very much a place for connoisseurs and whisky aficionados.

I think it’s great to have somewhere that is so unashamedly luxurious. However, it manages to express luxury and glamour in an elegant and thoughtful way. You know that the world’s most famous brands are here. But then you will find lesser-known names here too. For example, there is a new Anabela Chan store, which sells the most incredible sustainable jewellery. So even the discovery brands in Knightsbridge exude glamour. That’s exactly what we need now and again – it’s the escapism that appealed to me as a teenager flicking through magazines and imagining what Knightsbridge would be like. 

Harrods. You can’t miss it, particularly recently when it has hosted spectacular takeovers like Dior at Christmas and Yayoi Kusama for Louis Vuitton in the new year.

In a comparatively small area, you can find absolutely everything, from a Michelin-starred 10-course experience to some falafel or even great pub grub, like at The Grenadier. But if I was going to sit down and eat something, I would go to Kama by Vineet in Harrods, which does great Indian food (Vineet Bhatia is the first Indian Michelin-starred chef in the world). It serves awesome food – who would think that eating in a shop could be this incredible. And there’s a new patisserie in Harrods on the fourth floor that’s been opened by Angelo Musa, who is an award-winner and executive pastry chef at the Michelin-starred Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris. Kerridge’s Fish & Chips is also in Harrods – Tom Kerridge is Michelin-starred too. And if you want meat, there’s the store’s The Grill, which does a good steak (you can tell I’m a Harrods superfan). But if I was with a girlfriend who wanted something a little less committed in terms of food, then The Rosebery at the Mandarin Oriental does the best, most inventive salads in London.

The Berkeley’s Prêt-à-Portea is always a winner. Then you’ve got to photograph Harrods. It’s quite hard to get away from the store in Knightsbridge as it’s such a dominant building. And inside there’s a mad rhino in the middle of the technology department. It’s simply there for no other reason than it makes a great picture.

It would be in Trevor Square – a very traditional, very classic, white London house, low key but very convenient.

You need to have a tootle into Hyde Park. The weather needs to be reasonable, but swathe yourself in enough cashmere and you’ll be warm enough. You might also be lucky enough to see the Household Cavalry canter past, or, while you’re reading a great novel, some film star might come jogging by pretending they’re not famous. But they are because they’re wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses.

All the time. You can be a flaneur in Knightsbridge in a way that you can’t really in many places in London. You turn a corner and you’re more than likely to come across something unexpected – there’s a very high concentration of architecturally exciting churches from a wide range of denominations, from Presbyterian to Anglo-Catholic, Russian Orthodox to German Evangelical, not to mention the famous Brompton Oratory. But there’s always something going on and it’s somewhere that feels as if it’s constantly evolving, whether it’s the people and the shops, the bars and restaurants, or the Burberry flagship opposite Harvey Nichols or the Apple Store on Brompton Road, which is huge. There’s a kind of modernity coming in that sits very comfortably alongside the high-end luxury. There’s a McLaren showroom here, which makes a lot of sense given the spectacle of supercars driving up and down Brompton Road.

The little whisky bar at The Berkeley. At the end of a really luxurious evening, maybe you’ve earnt a dram of some extraordinary single malt whisky in such a beautiful space. In my fantasy life I’d have a spot of a really special The Macallan before sliding off upstairs for a lovely long sleep in one of the Berkeley’s suites. It’s the kind of life I dreamt of as a teenager, in a cold bedroom in the far north of England staring out at the sheep.

The fact that you’ve got the combination of massive Royal Parks and nature, the best shopping on the planet, incredible hotels and food and drink, and you’re also on the edge of some of the best museums as well. It’s a microcosm of the most gorgeous and best bits of London all in one square mile. And the people-watching as well is second to none – if you’ve got the time to let the world go past, that’s a great joy.

Love is the Drug by Roxy Music. Or Pull Up to the Bumper by Grace Jones.

Glamorous; opulent; British.

Knightsbridge can’t just be one person – it has something for everyone.