Mayfair

From around 1686, a fair was held each May in the fields near the present site of Shepherd Market, between Piccadilly and Park Lane. It was called the May Fair: two plain English words, the month and the event. 'May' traces through Old English 'Mæi' to Latin 'Maius,' named for Maia, the Roman goddess of earth and growth. 'Fair' came through Old French 'feire' from Medieval Latin 'feria,' meaning a holy day set aside for rest and trade.

The May Fair was not a genteel occasion. Contemporary accounts describe it as noisy, disorderly, and densely crowded, a week of rope-dancers, puppet shows, gin sellers, and gambling booths held in fields that were being steadily surrounded by aristocratic townhouses. By the 1730s and 1740s, those new residents were petitioning Parliament for relief. In 1764, after decades of complaint, the fair was formally suppressed.

By the time the fair ended, its name had already transferred to the neighborhood. Streets, leases, and parish records referred to the area as Mayfair through the first half of the 18th century, and the suppression of the event did nothing to dislodge the name. Mayfair was developed as a fashionable residential district in the early 1700s, with Grosvenor Square completed by 1737 and Berkeley Square landscaped by the 1740s.

The name's survival is a small irony: the city's most expensive postal district was named for a market fair that its own residents found intolerable. The word 'fair' in the sense of a periodic market comes ultimately from Latin 'feriae,' the days on which courts were closed and trading was permitted near a temple. The religious truce that once suspended litigation became, in London's West End, the address that commands the highest property prices in England.