THE HEADLINE ON the cover of the April 13, issue of the Evening Standard read, '"The US Embassy Siege." Inasmuch as Britain had just endured the unfortunate saga of the 15 marines and sailors captured by Iran and then released with goody bags, one might have assumed this was a feature about the truly terrible Iranian hostage siege in 1979 that ultimately brought down the Carter administration.

One would have been wrong to do so: the subtitle of the article read "How the Residents of W1 Saw Off the Yanks." Aha! This was to be yet another piece about the Americans besmirching Grosvenor Square.

There has been an American presence in the Square since 1786, though the actual Ambassador lives in Winfield House in Regent's Park, a home donated by Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton.

The much-beloved Ambassador during World War II, John Gilbert Winant, was adored by Londoners from the East End to Mayfair to Clapham to St John's Wood. His personal generosity and solidarity with Britain during the darkest days of the Blitz endeared him to the country for a generation. One of the many legends about Winant was his insistence on distributing luxury foods to Londoners sheltering in tube stations during the nightly bombings. After the war, when he visited London, theatregoers would run over to him to greet him, tears in their eyes. He was given the Freedom of the City by various British municipalities.

Sixty years on, the attitude of Londoners towards Americans is radically different. After

Now, after years of protests that the Embassy is the number one terrorist target in the world, the Mayfair Residents association has finally succeeded in driving the Embassy from its historic residence. The U.S. Navy Department has already moved from its beautiful offices; shortly after 9/11 a friend who had been activated to Reserve duty in London told me that her uniformed colleagues were fearful of going out for a walk because several had been at the receiving end of stunning verbal abuse. This I can believe, because no sooner had 9/11 happened than I was being lectured on the cowardice of the Yanks and how their support for Israel had left the world in turmoil. (One cab driver told me that British pilots and passengers would have seen off all four sets of hijackers.) As early as September 13, 2001, retired American Ambassador Philip Lader was foot-stomped and shouted down by a hostile London audience on the BBC's "Question Time."

So, here we are in 2007, and Mayfair residents have staged hunger strikes and loud protests at meetings with representatives of the Federal government in an effort to shut down the embassy. The reasoning presented by Mayfair protestors was that the local residents have been in mortal danger since 9/11. Another obvious reason is the depreciation of local property and the cost of home insurance. In the end, the present ambassador, Robert Tuttle, instructed real estate agents Knight Frank to put the site on the market. It is believed the Embassy staff will be moved to Kensington Palace or Greenwich, if the local residents there do not go on hunger strike as well.