From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
London is all very well, as the old joke has it, but it will be nicer when they’ve finished building it. The capital is subject to a continual process of revision, towered over by cranes and echoing to the chatter of pneumatic drills and the inscrutable yells of builders as they put up office blocks and much-needed luxury flats. All of this, naturally, means there is much that has been lost along the way. And that is where Steven Brindle and the archivists of Historic England step in, with this sumptuously illustrated retrospective of interiors that, for various reasons, no longer exist.
The 20th century saw arguably the greatest transformation of London in its history, certainly since the Great Fire; this is attributable principally to three factors – bombing, taxation and town planners. The first of these naturally looms largest in the public consciousness. Holland House, for example, the last surviving Jacobean mansion in central London, was gutted by incendiary bombs in September 1940. (There is a charming – albeit probably staged – photograph of overcoated men browsing volumes in the library with the debris of the collapsed ceiling piled up around them.)
But while the damage caused by the Blitz was considerable, zealous municipal officials, intent on appearing forward-facing and regenerative, wrought as much destruction as the Luftwaffe. Meanwhile, the punitive taxes and death duties levied by early Labour governments led to countless grand houses being bulldozed or sold for no reason other than to pre-empt a hefty bill from the exchequer. Furniture was auctioned off, art collections broken up, and in some cases entire rooms were dismantled and exported wholesale to American museums. The remnants of Lansdowne House in Mayfair have been installed in the Met in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, while the Peacock Room from 49 Princes Gate in Kensington, a tour de force of the Aesthetic Movement by James McNeill Whistler replete with hundreds of pieces of Chinese porcelain, can now be viewed at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C.
The dining room at 49 Princes Gate, London, the home of the shipowner Frederick Richards Leyland, photographed in 1877. Photo: Bedford Lemere; © Historic England
Just as the newer iterations of London have been overlaid on what was already there, with recent constructions placed on to existing streetplans, so the photographs in this book depict a layering of historical tastes. It is fascinating to see the austere Palladianism of the early 18th century cluttered up with the occasional tables and seaside-tearoom potted plants that the Victorians favoured; after all, these evolving interiors were still used and inhabited, rather than being preserved as historical time capsules for the general public to traipse through.
Sometimes the decorative whims reflected imperial globetrotting, with drawing rooms kitted out like a Moorish seraglio or a stuffed rhino’s head looming over the mantelpiece. Around the fin de siècle the styles associated with Louis XV enjoyed a brief vogue, with intricate rococo details and elaborate frescoes superimposed on Georgian neoclassical rooms. In the case of Stanmore Hall in Harrow, a Tudor-style manor of the 1840s was extensively refitted in elaborate Arts and Crafts splendour by Morris & Co. It was the firm’s largest ever contract; its hirsute and ardently socialist founder was said to have been somewhat conflicted about working for a plutocrat who had made his fortune in Australian mines, but he did the work all the same.
The styles of high modernism were more revolutionary than evolutionary in spirit, so where they were deployed the tendency was to replace rather than add to what had gone before. Art deco, which found its fullest expression in hotels, ocean liners and film sets, was a more fashionable alternative in interwar London, and its characteristic chromium fittings, playfully geometric furniture and grandiose theatricality make several appearances here. Mulberry House, a Lutyens-designed mansion in Westminster owned by a director of ICI, featured specially commissioned reliefs by the sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger and immense art deco murals by Glyn Philpot depicting Oedipus and the Sphinx, Leda and the Swan and other classical figures in all their rectilinear splendour.
Fay Wray, photographed in her living room at 20 Grosvenor Square, London, in 1935. Photo: Millar & Harris; © Historic England
Elsewhere, Fay Wray’s London pad in Grosvenor Square was an exercise in sumptuous Hollywood moderne, in which the King Kong actress must have felt quite at home. She is shown reading in her living room, alongside a bizarre set of curlicued wrought-iron gates which divide the space, sitting in a chunky cuboid armchair that envelops her slim figure like the grip of a giant gorilla. But alongside the ardent modernists and moderne-ists there are photographs of any number of exotic, adventurous and refined interiors from the 1920s and ’30s, which Brindle regards as the golden age of decoration. Here are works by Sibyl Colefax, Syrie Maugham, Paul Nash, Eric Gill and more, all now lost to time.
For self-evident technical reasons, the colour schemes, so intrinsic to the concept of decor, are left to the imagination of the reader, but the reproductions – all in glorious monochrome – are nonetheless highly evocative. The pictures date as far back as the 1880s, reproduced from glass-plate negatives; others are drawn from the archives of fashionable society photographers or magazines such as Country Life, which despite its rustic title did so much to chronicle the largely vanished habitats of urban high society. Not every interior in this book is grand – the last entry, for example, is an endearing post-war show home in Highbury, all Formica and Festival of Britain prints – but the vast majority are.
To peek into these ballrooms and echoing sculpture galleries, with their grandiose Robert Adam dimensions, is at once alien and entirely familiar. The general layout of the rooms is instantly reminiscent of buildings that were subsequently repurposed as museums or hotels, but it is strange to consider that the day after they were photographed they might have hosted coming-out balls, fancy-dress parties or illicit games of baccarat where mutton-chopped men of affairs discussed the business of state. It is not just the decorative schemes that have vanished.
Wimborne House, London, photographed in the 1880s. Photo: Bedford Lemere; © Historic England
London Lost Interiors by Steven Brindle is published by Atlantic Publishing.
From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.