What's it like to own the world?

Or to be known as Britain's richest individual? The Duke of Westminster is the only one who knows. The following is on the plaque of his ancestor's statue in Grosvenor Square.

In the seventeenth Century, Sir Thomas Grosvenor married Mary Davies, a London Heiress. Her dowry was part of the manor of Ebury - the land devloped by their successors as Mayfair in the Eighteenth Century, followed by Belgravia and Pimlico in the nineteenth century.

In 1979 Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor became the 6th Duke of Westminster. He comissioned this statue in 1997.

The hounds on the monument are talbot dogs, introduced to this country by the Normans as hunting dogs. Now extinct, they were the ancestral stock of the modern bloodhound.

Talbot dogs were added to the Grosvenor coat of arms in the seventeenth century. The gold wheatsheaf, known in heraldry as a 'Garb' appeared on the coat of arms for the first time in 1398.