This week Belgravia morphed into the scene of some rather dramatic motoring escapades reports Matthew Steeples (and this time it’s nothing to do with the BBC’s ‘The Capture’)
Oh so genteel Belgravia is an area of London one would traditionally associate with dowager duchesses and ageing colonels. It is about to be brought to the viewing public’s attention in an ITV adaptation of Julian Fellowes’ eponymous period novel, but this week it also became the scene of several strange incidents involving motor cars.
On Wednesday, at the Sloane Square end of Cliveden Place, a Range Rover was dumped in the middle of the road at a rather odd angle. Its hazard lights were left flashing and it sported quite a bash to its bonnet. On Thursday afternoon (where were the parking wardens in the intervening period?), it remained. Nobody seemed to bat an eyelid apart from a mansion block resident who said to me: “Could it be a bomb?” I suggested she call 999 and within an hour, it was gone. The mystery of how it ended up dumped there remains to be solved.
Early evening Thursday, further along at the intersection of where Cliveden Place meets Eaton Square, I witnessed another curious motoring incident. Here, I spotted two police cars rammed into a BMW. Plainly there had been some kind of chase and though the officers of the law were loath to reveal the exact details, the two men in the vehicle were certainly getting an almighty grilling. They’d most certainly been ‘CAPTURED’ (excuse the pun).
The last time major drama here involving automobiles occurred in the neighbourhood was in 2019 in the BBC mini-series The Capture when Callum Turner was bundled out of a taxi in which he’d been kidnapped. He was forced into the bowels of an American security services safe house, but unlike the hoodlums yesterday later escaped.
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Bizarre.
Terrorists.