Belgravia
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English
[edit]
Etymology
[edit]After Richard Grosvenor, 2nd Marquess of Westminster, whose title was Viscount Belgrave when the area was developed in the 1820s. The village of Belgrave, Cheshire is close to the Grosvenor family's main country seat.
Pronunciation
[edit]Proper noun
[edit]Belgravia
- An area in the City of Westminster, central London, noted for being one of the wealthiest districts in the world (OS grid ref TQ2879).
- 1854, Elizabeth Gaskell, chapter I, in North and South:
- Not but that Edith was very thoroughly and properly in love; still she would certainly have preferred a good house in Belgravia, to all the picturesqueness of the life which Captain Lennox described at Corfu.
- 1858, William Makepeace Thackeray, A History of Pendennis: His fortunes and misfortunes, his friends and his greatest enemy[1], Volume 1, Preface:
- What more exciting than a ruffian (with many admirable virtues) in St. Giles's, visited constantly by a young lady from Belgravia? What more stirring than the contrasts of society?
- 1918, Henry Adams, chapter 6, in The Education of Henry Adams:
- […] Browning seemed rather in place, as a middle-aged gentlemanly English Pippa Passes; while afterwards, in the light of Belgravia dinner-tables, he never made part of his background except by effacement.
- 1922, Agatha Christie, chapter 1, in The Secret Adversary:
- Tuppence's hostel was situated in what was charitably called Southern Belgravia.