If you stroll out of Sloane Square, past the neat garden squares and the Georgian terraces that never seem to gather dust, you are entering Hans Town — a name that sounds like Monopoly kitsch but actually hides one of London’s strangest civic ghosts.

It isn’t a town. It never really was. What we call Hans Town was in fact a speculative development cooked up in the 1770s on land owned by Sir Hans Sloane, the physician, collector, and obsessive hoarder whose cabinets of curiosities became the foundations of the British Museum. (The man also loved cocoa to the point that Cadbury’s empire can be traced back to his experiments. Knightsbridge, quite literally, was built on chocolate.)

Sloane died, the land passed to his descendants, and Henry Holland, architect of polite restraint, was hired to lay out a fashionable quarter. Thus rose Hans Town: orderly terraces, white stucco, neat proportions. It had a centrepiece too — Hans Place, a graceful oval square that looked like the perfect stage set for Austen heroines and Regency intrigues. Jane Austen herself visited her brother Henry, who lived here for a time, so the literary fantasy isn’t far off.

By the 19th century, Hans Town had blurred into its glamorous neighbours. Harrods arrived down the road, Sloane Square became its beating heart, and Hans Town as a civic identity dissolved into postcodes and property deeds. What lingers are the names — Hans Place, Hans Road, Hans Crescent — each one a small reminder of a long-gone “town” that was more marketing exercise than municipality.

Yet the aura endures. Hans Place is still manicured, ringed by townhouses whose curtains seem to twitch only at estate agents’ valuations. The area is wealthy, immaculate, faintly unreal. Even its most famous modern moment had a whiff of theatre: Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy on Hans Crescent, turning the estate’s Georgian dignity into a stage for international farce.

There’s another layer too: the quiet iron fist of the Cadogan Estate, which still owns much of Hans Town. The Sloane family married into the Cadogans, and their descendants remain the landlords of half of Chelsea and Knightsbridge. This isn’t just history preserved in stone; it’s feudalism with better landscaping. The rents are high, the leases short, and the control absolute. When you walk through Hans Town, you are not just seeing Georgian London — you are seeing centuries of power held in the same few aristocratic hands.

Hans Town’s name is also baked into that other word of west London mythology: “Sloane.” The “Sloane Rangers” of the 1980s — posh girls in pearls haunting King’s Road — are the descendants of this geography. Their label was a wink at Sloane Square, Hans Town’s front door, and their legacy lingers in the lingering whiff of cashmere and entitlement you catch when the wind blows right.

Walk Hans Town today and you sense both continuity and emptiness. The houses are perfect but often dark at night — owned by overseas investors or occupied only occasionally. This is London at its most polished and least lived-in: a ghost town for millionaires.

Hans Town remains, then, a curious paradox. Conceived as a genteel village for London’s elite, it survives only as a name, a pattern of streets, a whiff of history. And yet that name still has magic: say “Hans Place” and it conjures up Austen, Harrods, oligarchs, Assange, all in one. A little oval garden square where London’s past and present continue to brush against each other, quietly, elegantly, and with more than a hint of absurdity.

Boundary Estate: Britain’s First Council Estate