Belgravia

After Richard Grosvenor, 2nd Marquess of Westminster, whose title was Viscount Belgrave when the area was developed in the 1820s, thus from Belgrave +‎ -ia. The village of Belgrave, Cheshire is close to the Grosvenor family's main country seat.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /bɛlˈɡɹeɪ.vi.ə/
• Rhymes: -eɪviə

Belgravia

1. 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.

2. Other places named after Belgravia in London:
   1. A locality in the Cabonne council area, central New South Wales, Australia.
   2. A neighbourhood in south-west Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
   3. A suburb of Johannesburg, Gauteng province, South Africa.
   4. A suburb in north Harare, Zimbabwe.

• Belgravian