A hike up London’s Park Lane and around historic Mayfair for Google Earth. This is where, two centuries ago and a bit, Beau Brummell kept a future king waiting while the prince kept his “wife” waiting, and prime ministers, scientists, poets and scoundrels lived lavishly, not necessarily on their own money.

The 24 sample nuggets of history on this tour were culled from a pair of online goldmines of information, both of them fascinating and often funny. One is the Centre for Metropolitan History’s many pages of extracts from the 1878 memoir “Old and New London”. The other is GardenVisit.com’s edited version of Findlay Muirhead’s 1927 London guidebook. Grab the Google Earth tour here.

Pardon the whimsical photo trickery, but this gives an idea of what Mayfair looked like when our story begins. Below is the way it appears today. The structures jutting upward from the bottom are St James’s Palace.

The one-time leper hospital became Henry VIII’s St James’s Palace in the 1530s. It remains the royal court’s official headquarters but is best known now as the residence of Prince Charles, current heir to the throne.

It didn’t take long for May Fair, the annual funfair sanctioned by Edward, to get carried away. The entertainment became so bawdy that the event was “suppressed” in 1664 on grounds of “looseness and irregularity” and doing the common man no good. Nevertheless later generations of the common man revived it.

Around 1700 there were “shows of all kinds” taking place “on the north side of Piccadilly, in Shepherd’s Market, Shepherd’s Court, White Horse Street, Sun Court, Market Court and on the open space westwards, Chapel Street and Hertford Street, as far as Tyburn (now Park) Lane”.

There was a Market House with butchers’ stalls on the ground floor that was taken over during the fair for the sale of toys and gingerbread, and upstairs a theatre with puppets putting on shows from the windows. Outdoors to the west were legions of jugglers, fencers and boxers, many rides like swings and roundabouts, and streets filled with sausage stalls and gambling tables.

In 1701 the police arrested “some young women of light character” at the fair and a riot broke out, in the course of which a constable was killed. The guilty party escaped but a butcher who’d been in the melee was hung at Tyburn for his role in it.

This was the sort of thing that prompted King George I to clamp down on the scandalous fair. In 1721 the London Journal reported that “the ground upon which the May Fair formerly was held is marked out for a large square, and several fine streets and houses are to be built upon it”.

Park Lane itself was but a desolate bye-road at the time, “the lane leading from Piccadilly to Tyburn”.

At 1 Hamilton Place lived (and died) John Scott, first Earl of Eldon (1751-1838), Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain and a consummate politician, in the euphemistic sense that his only ambition was to remain in office. He managed to do so for four decades, never once supporting any measure of reform.

At 4 Hamilton Place was the residence of Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) and hero of Waterloo.

It had been Apsley House, the home of Henry, Lord Apsley, Lord Chancellor, but the government bought the house for Wellington in 1820. After his victory over Napoleon the following year, Wellington retired here, and on June 18 every year would play host to kings, foreign ambassadors and his former comrades in arms to commemorate the great battle.

Every afternoon almost until his death, the duke would ride out to the Horse Guards or the park to the cheers of assembled admirers, many of whom would come from far and wide to witness the sight.

Where Park Lane and Hamilton Place meet there was a tremendous fountain designed by Thomas Thornycroft, who also sculpted London’s famous statue of Boadicea. Erected in 1875, the fountain featured larger-than-life marble likenesses of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton atop figures of Tragedy, Comedy and Poetry.

Crowning the Poets’ Fountain, 26 feet from the ground, was a gilded, bronze-winged figure of Fame with one foot on a globe, blowing her trumpet and bearing a wreath.

Long since demolished to allow the Hilton Hotel to expand, 19 Park Lane was until 1965 the site of Londonderry House, the fantastically decorated townhouse of the Irish Stewarts known as the Marquesses of Londonderry.

Charles William Vane, the third marquess, bought what had been Holdernesse House (the town mansion of the D’Arcys) in 1819 so his family, based at Wynyard Park in County Durham, would have a home for their long stays in the capital. In 1850 Benjamin Dean and Philip Wyatt were given a blank cheque to refurbish the place, and they truly gave London something to talk about.

During World War I the house was requisitioned for government use and was gutted to such an extent that it was rarely used again. The Stewarts sold up in the early 1960s.

At 10 Hertford Street was the home of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), the Irish playwright and Whig statesman best remembered for his witty comedy “The School for Scandal”. Buried in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, he was the son of Thomas Sheridan, the actor, educator and dictionary author.

The same house had been the home of General John Burgoyne, the unsuccessful hero of the American Revolutionary War, and before him John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718-92), who served as postmaster general, secretary of state and First Lord of the Admiralty, but is best remembered as the inventor of the sandwich.

It’s not true, though, that the earl married meat to bread so he could stay in the game at the cards table. He was in fact a hard worker, and it’s more probable that he needed a “handy” meal so he could keep toiling at his desk. In any event the utile sandwich outlasted his claim to the Pacific islands that Captain James Cook named after him — they’re now known as Hawaii.

At 14 Hertford Street circa 1805 lived Dr Edward Jenner (1749-1823), who despite saving countless lives with his discovery of a vaccination against smallpox, was unable to maintain his practice in London and returned to his native Gloucestershire in dismay.

HB Trelawny stayed at #30 Hertford. He was a friend and biographer of sorts of Lord Byron. One source indicates he was with the poet when he died in Italy, though in his own “Recollections” of 1858 he says he arrived on the scene a week late. But then Byron found him a brilliant storyteller who was far from truthful.

Nearby this address was a pub called the Dog and Duck, which denoted its clientele’s interest in duckhunting, a fashionable sport here in what were then the London suburbs, until the elite discovered pigeon-shooting. The pub had its own duck pond with a knee-high fence around it. Spectators would try not to fall in the water while watching the spaniels dive for their prey. Somehow it doesn’t sound too sporting.

Edward Bulwer Lytton wrote his “Last Days of Pompeii” and “Rienzi” at 36 Hertford Street. Today of course he’s thanked for giving us phrases such as “the great unwashed” and “pursuit of the almighty dollar”, but he’s also snickered upon for the immortal opening line, “It was a dark and stormy night.” A contest in his name immortalises more such bad writing.

Further along were the homes of Sir Charles Locock, physician to Queen Anne, and the scholarly Sir Alexander Cockburn, Lord Chief Justice of England.

At the corner of Curzon and South Audley streets was Chesterfield House, built in 1750 for Viscount Lascelles and Princess Mary. Lord Chesterfield, pictured here, died here in 1773.

Nearby, at #73 South Audley, was Bute House, the residence of Lord Bute (1713-92), George III’s unpopular minister. It subsequently became the Egyptian Embassy.

Curzon Street takes its name from the original chief landlord here, George Augustus Curzon, third Viscount Howe.

At #8 Curzon Street Mary Berry died at the age of 90 in 1852. When she and her younger sister Agnes were in their early 20s, they were deemed “the best-informed and most perfect creatures I ever saw at their age” by the great writer, historian Horace Walpole, son of Prime Minister Sir Robert.

Horace, who was in his 70s when he made the evaluation, enjoyed a friendship with the girls – he called them his “two wives” – that’s been much celebrated since. They may well have had something to do with him coining the term “serendipity”.

When Walpole succeeded to the earldom of Orford, he offered to marry Mary. She declined, but on his death in 1797 she and Agnes were named his literary executors. Among the works they had to deal with was “”Reminiscences, Written in 1788, for the Amusement of Miss Mary and Miss Agnes Berry”.

Also along Curzon Street was Sunderland House, which stood on the site of the original Mayfair Chapel. Just metres away was another “chapel” where people of all classes came for marriage ceremonies performed secretly and expeditiously, yet legally, often after midnight and sometimes using “a ring off the bed curtain”.

The licence could be predated or postdated, or the nuptials not registered at all, depending on the state of the debt or romance that was forcing the issue.

The clergyman in charge, Dr George Keith, made a tidy income in defiance of the Bishop of London, and when he was excommunicated, simply excommunicated his bishop in turn. But Keith was jailed for several years, even though his “shop” stayed in business until the Marriage Act of 1753 shut it down.

The Scottish author of “Peregrine Pickle”, Tobias Smollett (1721-71), was another citizen of Curzon Street, though in decidedly less swank lodgings, when he heard the news of the victory of Culloden. His response was the moving poem “The Tears of Scotland”.

And Sir Francis Chantrey (1782-1841) lived on Curzon before he achieved success as a sculptor. Having grabbed attention by modelling the head of Satan, he was commissioned to make four colossal busts of Admirals Howe, St Vincent, Duncan and Nelson. The statues of George Washington in the State House in Boston and the Duke of Wellington in front of the London Exchange are also his work.

The poet Caroline Norton (1808-77) lived at 3 Chesterfield Street, not far from the home of her father, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, though he died when she was still a girl. She’s best remembered for “The Undying One” and “The Child of the Islands”.

No 11 Chesterfield Street was the residence of Sir Robert Adair (1763-1855), who forged the template for Western diplomats. He died here in 1855.

Along Chesterfield Street “Beau” Brummell also lived, following his retirement from the army, still basking in the sunshine of royal favour. The Prince of Wales, later George IV, would often come to watch the great arbiter of fashion and taste spend his five daily hours getting dressed.

“And here the Prince would continue to sit so late into the evening that he would send his horses home from the door, and insist on taking a quiet chop or steak with his host, but with no intention of returning home till he was half-seas over, and the streaks of early morning were appearing in the sky.” So wrote Findlay Muirhead in 1927.

George Bryan Brummell (1778-1840), portrayed with less flamboyance than he deserved by Stewart Granger opposite Liz Taylor in the 1954 film (Peter Ustinov as the Prince Regent), basically invented the modern man’s suit and tie, though his practice of polishing his boots with champagne never caught on.

Next to the convergence of Great Stanhope and Deanery streets was Seamore Place, where at #8 the storied Lady Blessington held her salon from 1832 to ‘36.

Marguerite, Countess of Blessington (1789-1849), was an author (”Conversations of Lord Byron”) and popular society hostess. The daughter of a violent, hard-drinking Irishman grew from ugly duckling to self-educated belle, escaped an enforced marriage to a violent, hard-drinking military man and was saved first by an English officer, then by the wealthy Lord Mountjoy, later Earl of Blessington.

They lived in luxury in St James’s Square, hosting swank soirees for, among others, the Count d’Orsay, since defined as “the last of the dandies”. The Frenchman charmed them both and accompanied them on their continental travels, then agreed to marry the earl’s daughter by his first marriage – reluctantly, since he loved the countess, but beneficially, since the earl left his fortune to his daughter upon his death in 1829. The marriage ended swiftly, and the young wife took the money with her.

But not before the lady and the count had magnificently furnished their homes first here in Seamore Place, then at Gore House, the better to entertain posh guests, among them Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Hans Christien Andersen. Expenses quickly outstripped income and, up to their eyes in debt, the pair fled to France, where Marguerite abruptly suffered a heart attack and died.

Our sole detour on this ritzy meander is necessary only because the Countess of Blessington and her lover-cum-son-in-law Count D’Orsay are so bloody interesting. They moved from Seamore Place to Gore House, which once occupied the three-acre site of the Royal Albert Hall, Royal College of Art and Royal Geographical Society. The term “gore” refers to what had been a narrow, triangular slice of land.

Prior to the lavish 1836-49 entertainments of our scandalous couple, Gore House had been the home, from 1808 to 1821, of William Wilberforce, the Tory parliamentarian best remembered as a leading campaigner against the slave trade. Ioan Gruffudd is to portray Wilberforce in the film “Amazing Grace”, directed by Michael Apted, due for release in February 2007, coinciding with the 200th anniversary of Parliament’s vote to ban British subjects from transporting slaves.

In 1851 the chef Alexis Soyer turned Gore House into a restaurant to feed the masses attenting the Great Exhibition, after which the Crown took possession.

Dorchester House was the residence of RS Holford, revered to this day for his green thumb, and he had a garden here to justify everyone’s envy. His home occupied the site of the mansion, also called Dorchester House, where Lord Yarmouth lived. Francis Charles Seymour-Ingram (1777-1842) was the third Marquis of Hertford, his father having been a champion of Britain’s right to tax its colonies, which caused considerable trouble in America.

His son, the third earl, died here in 1842, having caused his own share of upsets domestically by marrying Mademoiselle Maria Fagniani, the illegitimate daughter allegedly of the fourth Duke of Queensberry (or possibly of George Selwyn, or perhaps George Selwyn’s butler).

By all accounts a rogue and a wastrel, Yarmouth wed the mademoiselle on the promise of the duke’s generosity and, between that and his close ties with the partying Prince of Wales, made an excellent model for the fictional Marquis of Steyne in Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair”.

No 6 Tilney Street was the last city residence of Maria Anne Fitzherbert (1756-1837), the not-so-secret wife of King George IV.

The Roman Catholic, twice-divorced Mrs Fitzherbert was obliged by money and politics to remain socially ignored, since George, then Prince Regent, could obtain neither the law’s nor his father’s permission to claim her as his wife. Nevertheless they contracted a “marriage” in 1785 and lived together for a time (though not here). The prince was subsequently able to secure a grant to pay off his foolish debts, but it necessitated a public denial of any relationship with Fitzherbert.

Benjamin Disraeli lived here at 1 Grosvenor Gate for more than 30 years, including during his first term as prime minister, moving into the former home of his one-time colleague Wyndham Lewis after marrying his widow in 1839.

Grosvenor House was the city residence of the Duke of Westminster and before that, as Gloucester House, the home of the Duke of Gloucester, younger brother of George III.

Great Stanhope Street bears the family name of the original Earl of Chesterfield, who owned the estate to the east.

Lord Palmerston lived at #9, and at #5 was Lord Fitzroy Somerset (later Lord Raglan), who commanded the British army in the Crimea.

At #15 lived the first Viscount Hardinge, once-time governor-general of India and successor of the Duke of Wellington as commander-in-chief of the British army.

Dudley House, formerly about here, was the residence of John William Ward, first Earl of Dudley (1781-1833), Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs under Prime Minister George Canning and a bit of a man about town, perhaps so much so that he died childless and the title lapsed until a distant cousin revived it in 1860. Not much of a foreign minister, his reputation was really as a writer and a talker.

Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829), the greatest chemist of his age, resided at 26 Park Street. He discovered electrolysis and claimed credit for inventing the “Davy lamp”, which miners used, but ended up dying of too many gases inhaled experimentally, to one of which, nitrous oxide (laughing gas), he was addicted.