This street was laid out around 1660 for the game of paille-maille (a type of croquet crossed with golf), which also gave Pall Mall its name, and it quickly became the place to be seen. Samuel Pepys, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope all wrote about it, and it continued as the beau monde's social playground into the early 19th century, long after the game it was built for had gone out of vogue. Something of the former style survives on those summer days when the queen is throwing a Buckingham Palace garden party: hundreds of her subjects throng the Mall, from the grand and titled to the humble and hardworking, all of whom have donned hat and frock to take afternoon tea with the monarch -- or somewhere near her -- on the lawns of Buck House. The old Mall still runs alongside the graceful, pink, 115-foot-wide avenue that replaced it in 1904 for just such occasions. Tube: Charing Cross or Green Park.