Nearly a decade ago the BBC made a series of programmes portraying the lives of high-profile investors and entrepreneurs, including financiers Sir James Goldsmith, Tiny Rowland and Jim Slater, who helped shape the economic landscape during the Thatcher years. All these individuals had one thing in common – they were based in Mayfair.

The programme, called The Mayfair Set, defined the image of the well-heeled area as a centre for the aggressive business culture of the era, one that was to end in the recession of the early 1990s. Fast-forward to a new millennium, and as markets boomed again, Mayfair had reinvented itself as the centre of another, very different business culture, this time occupied by wealthy hedge fund managers and private equity power brokers. From being the capital of no-holds-barred capitalism, it had become the centre for the more discreet world of alternative investment and private banking.