For people who don’t live in London, Hasbro’s board game Monopoly manages to provide a window into the English capital, from the “smelly old waterworks”, to quote a character from the London-set Only Fools and Horses, to the quartet of rail stations and shopping mecca, Regent Street.

Yet Monopoly’s dark blue properties, Park Lane and Mayfair (or Park Place and Boardwalk in the US edition), arguably offer the most allure.

Old Kent Road

Monopoly has taken on a life of its own since its Illinois-born creator Lizzie Magie first put pencil to paper on its predecessor, The Landlord’s Game, in the early 1900s.

Variants that now include Monopoly for Sore Losers and Monopoly – Longest Game Ever are joined online by modern takes like Monopoly Megaways, a slot machine on the Paddy Power website. This latter experience melds the traditional game of luck with a real estate-themed minigame.

One thing remains consistent across many of these riffs on the classic formula – the place names.

Old Kent Road appears in Monopoly Megaways as a stereotypically ‘poor’ part of the board (in reality, houses in London’s SE1, which also includes Peckham from Only Fools and Horses, go for upwards of £300,000) and – of course – Park Lane and Mayfair feature as the pinnacle of virtual architecture.

Lizzie Magie

In real life, Mayfair has existed in some form since the turn of the first millennium, when the Romans built a fort on the site. It was later named for a local fair.

By Lizzie Magie’s time, the area had already hosted international celebrities like Teddy Roosevelt and (reportedly) the Powhatan princess Pocahontas. The opening of the famous hotel The Ritz in 1906 coincided with the launch of The Landlord’s Game.

The latter note makes an accidental kind of sense. Magie was American so unlikely to be as acquainted with Mayfair as her more famous contemporaries. However, as a staunch anti-capitalist, she would have been aware of the increasing influence of this economic system on the United States when she made The Landlord’s Game.

Monopoly in its modern form launched in 1935, around the time of FDR’s New Deal, which aided the development of capitalism in the US.

A Second Version

There’s a certain amount of irony involved in basing a board game on ruining others on the work of an anti-capitalist. It’s not necessarily what the writer and feminist would have wanted, given that a second version of The Landlord’s Game promoted the sharing of wealth instead.

Here’s the real kicker, though. Neither Park Lane nor Mayfair is worth the effort to acquire in Monopoly.

With a high development cost and a relatively low chance of ensnaring a player, the dark blue properties have much greater use as a means of acquiring the more useful orange and red spaces from inexperienced players. Orange includes the most-visited properties on the board, statistically.

Monopoly has a long and complicated history but its message remains clear – sometimes, it’s fun to be mean.