John Adams, the first US Ambassador to the Court of St. James (1785–1788), set a precedent. He lived at 9 Grosvenor Square in the newly fashionable Mayfair district of Westminster. The square was made up of Georgian buildings surrounding what was then London’s second largest garden park. For more than two centuries after Adams, Grosvenor Square would be the center of the US government in Britain.
The American presence around the square ebbed and flowed over the years. It especially flowed during the two world wars of the twentieth century. During World War II, Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had his headquarters at 20 Grosvenor Square. As a result, local wags called the area “Eisenthowplatz.” WWII, with its “American occupation” of England, saw so many American civilian and military officials in the neighborhood that it earned the nickname “Little America.”
The ebb came after WWII, yet the so-called American occupation may have looked larger because of Eero Saarinen’s US Embassy chancery, which opened in 1960. The first purpose-built embassy in the world, the Brutalist concrete building end-stopped the entire western side of the square. In its half century of use, it was also the largest embassy in Europe.
The US Navy’s European headquarters occupied Eisenhower’s old building before moving to Naples, Italy, in the early twenty-first century. During the Cold War, the US Office of Foreign Building Operations, the US Information Agency (USIA), the US Education Commission, and, a non-state actor, the American Red Cross, occupied buildings around the square. Little wonder that when Brits wanted to protest things American, like the Vietnam War, Grosvenor Square is where they went.
After the terrorist attacks in New York City, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, the western side of the square became a fortress. Michael Belding and Ted Grevstad-Nordbrock describe it as
The strains of such security measures in a highly gentrified neighborhood—one of the most affluent in the world—was one of the reasons the US finally decamped. Most of the US offices in the surrounding area had moved elsewhere by the time the new US Embassy building opened in Nine Elms, on the south bank of the Thames, in 2018. The new location is about two miles south-southeast of Grosvenor Square.
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The landmarked Saarinen building has been converted to a luxury hotel. Eisenhower and the US Navy’s HQ are now upscale apartments. “Little America” has become the “Qatari Quarter” due of the “growing number of affluent residents and property owners from this former British protectorate,” Belding and Grevstad-Nordbrock write. Nevertheless, the place is still filled with American ghosts, haunting the area as “an assemblage of landmarks and monuments, plaques and markers, as well as countless intangible associations with the onetime American presence.”
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There’s a statue of a standing (with cane) Franklin Roosevelt, paid for by British subscribers. Eisenhower is represented by another bronze. The Eagle Squadrons Memorial is dedicated to the 244 American volunteers and sixteen Britons who served in the RAF’s Eagle Squadrons between 1940 and 1942; seventy-seven were killed in action before the US entered the war. The Memorial Gates commemorate the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and those British and American diplomats who continue to work for peace. The 9/11 Memorial Garden honors the sixty-seven British nationals who died in New York City in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. (There was a statue to Ronald Reagan, but the new Qatari owners of the former embassy removed it—the opinionated London Remembers site now calls the statue “lost.”)
“The memorials call attention to figures who were especially important in the shared crises that both countries faced over the twentieth century,” Belding and Grevstad-Nordbrock. “If Little America was the physical embodiment of the ‘special relationship,’ then Grosvenor Square was its symbolic heart.”
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