Will Julian Fellowes’ Belgravia be his next Downton Abbey?

Julian Fellowes has a lavish new drama Alex Preston

Afew days before the Battle of Waterloo, the Duchess of Richmond gave a party at her house in Brussels that is almost as famous as the victory that followed. The whole of fashionable English society, many of whom were living in the Belgian capital, attended, alongside officers, diplomats and the Duke of Wellington himself, who went directly from the ball to the battlefield after receiving word, as guests sat down for dinner, that Napoleon had crossed the border and was only a few dozen miles distant.

Young men who had been dancing quadrilles at the ball were never seen alive again.

Julian Fellowes opens his Downton Abbey followup, Belgravia, with James Trenchard (Philip Glenister) and his wife, Anne (Tamsin Greig), attending the party. It is here, lubricated by the greater social fluidity that comes at times of war, that Sophia, the headstrong daughter of the upwardly mobile Trenchards, makes clear her love for Lord Bellasis, an officer serving under Wellington.

“The ball has always struck me as a particularly vivid moment,” Fellowes says. “The idea that these young men died while still in their evening dress. It is this extraordinary contrast of privilege and luxury and glamour with death and violence and savagery.”

It is also classic Fellowes terrain. The ball heralded a new era in Britain, when an ascendant middle class began to challenge the supremacy of the aristocracy and, following the fateful relationship between Sophia and Lord Bellasis, Belgravia skips forward 26 years, to London in 1841, and particularly to the eponymous borough where Lord Bellasis’ parents Lord and Lady Brockenhurst (Tom Wilkinson and Harriet Walter) find themselves living alongside the arriviste Trenchards. (Belgravia starts on Netflix this month).

“It is the beginning of where Downton ends,” says Fellowes. “Because this is the upwards curve that goes eventually into a melancholic decline.” The tide of Victorian optimism that lifted members of the lower-middle classes to positions of power and prestige receded with the First World War.

“For that reason it has a completely different dynamic to Downton,” Fellowes says. “It’s still a period drama and people are still wearing top hats. But it has a very different feeling.”

Despite this, Belgravia, which the writer has adapted from his bestselling 2016 novel of the same name, has all the ingredients that made Downton Abbey such a hit: high emotion, class friction, superb acting and, above all, a brilliantly compelling storyline centred around a secret connection between the Trenchards and the Brockenhursts that threatens the reputation of both families.

James Trenchard certainly has a lot to lose. Since the Duchess of Richmond’s ball he has flourished, first as a supplier of goods to the Duke of Wellington, and then as a partner of the famous — and non-fictional — Cubitt brothers, William, Lewis and Thomas, who built Belgravia. Lord and Lady Brockenhurst, meanwhile, represent everything Trenchard aspires to be: old money, buttressed by property, titles and esteemed ancestors.

Belgravia itself is also one of the characters in the novel — a place full of serene white houses and reserved opulence. It was radical when it was built in the early 19th century, a new town for the wealthy constructed on the marshes that stretched south and west from St. James’ in London.

“It was a total concept,” Fellowes says. “It was an attempt to build a society that was going to work. You build places for horses, carriages, upper servants. The interesting thing about Belgravia is that it was made up from scratch. If you dig through Belgravia, you don’t get to Georgian London, there’s just swamp. This gives it a kind of unity.”

Fellowes believes that Belgravia has changed less than other London quarters, its native classiness meaning there has never been any need to “gentrify” the area. “The smaller streets like Chapel Street are all packed and all lived in. I think it is still quite vivid. If you go through Eaton Square at night, most of the lights are on.”

On set, it’s clear the actors feel part of something special. Fellowes is a constant, immaculately dressed in Savile Row suits. And while he downplays talk of another Downton phenomenon, Glenister is less reticent.

Wearing a pair of prodigious mutton-chops (“My own!” he insists) and a velvet smoking jacket, he says “working with Julian is completely wonderful because you know you’re in the hands of a master. With a story as strong as this, who’s to say it won’t be another Downton?”