LONDON LOST INTERIORS BY STEVEN BRINDLE

With a foreword by

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON

ATLANTIC PUBLISHING in association with HISTORIC ENGLAND

HARDBACK | 4th November |£50 |

London: Lost Interiors, from celebrated historian Steven Brindle, invites readers into the lost world of London’s most spectacular 19th and 20th century homes for the first time.

Featuring more than 650 stunning photographs from the archives of Historic England, Bedford Lemere, and Millar & Harris, London: Lost Interiors reveals lavish Victorian drawing rooms and boudoirs, Oriental & Moorish themed rooms featuring exotic materials from leopard skin upholstery to tented ceilings. Edwardian libraries and smoking rooms, Modernist bathrooms and kitchens, fashionable Arts & Crafts houses and Art Deco apartments, as well as the first private homes to instal electricity, glass bricks, passenger lifts, plate-glass windows sheet-cut marble, chrome, fluorescent lights, aluminium-foil ceiling and modern bathrooms.

London: Lost Interiors features unseen images of some of the original grand houses that gave their names to London’s most luxurious hotels including Grosvenor House Hotel and The Dorchester; interiors of royal and aristocratic residences including Clarence House and White Lodge in Richmond; interiors designed to house priceless collections of art by Rosetti, Botticelli, Rubens, Reynolds, Sargent, Titian; and rooms decorated by artists Paul Nash, Eric Gill, Roger Fry, and Rex Whistler.

From the grand houses frequented by aristocracy to tiny art deco apartments at the vanguard of inter-war modernism, London: Lost Interiors is a window into London life from 1880-1940 before many of these magnificent interiors were destroyed or stripped out and lost forever.

Some of the hundreds of spectacular interiors revealed in the book include:

145 Piccadilly – The childhood home of Queen Elizabeth II before her father became King. The building was later destroyed during the Blitz.

Cecil Beaton’s small flat in Knightsbridge with wallpaper adorned with numerous cut-out photographs of society friends and celebrities including Greta Garbo and Gary Cooper.

15 Wilton Street – The starter home Somerset Maugham bought as a wedding present for his daughter Elizabeth and decorated by his wife, interior designer Syrie Maugham.

Brook House – The Mountbatten’s London apartment block with murals from war artist Rex Whistler.

Princess May’s cluttered sitting room desk at White Lodge in Richmond Park, revealing photos of her beau Prince Albert, before she later became Queen Mary.

For most of the period covered by the book, 1880-1940, London was the richest city in the world, capital of the largest empire in history, and the centre of a society of extraordinary vitality and complexity. At the time domestic architecture and interior design carried layers of significance and meaning which have since diminished. For the Victorians, Edwardians and the inter-war generations, homes were a chief visible expression of their place in society.

Interior design emerges from the book as a major art-form – one controlled by the clients as much as by the designers – the photographs the only record of the most fugitive and fragile of mediums. While 19th and 20th century London emerges as a multicultural melting pot with many of the interiors commissioned by wealthy clients from India, America, Greece, France, sand Spain living in London. Alongside British clients choosing to transform their homes with specially designed oriental interiors to house objects brought back from their time in the Colonies and to remind them of their travels to the Far East.

About the photography in the book

Images in the first half of the book are dominated by the firm of Bedford Lemere & Company (1839-1911), Britain’s leading architectural photographers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The firm’s surviving archive was bought by the Historic England Archive in 1955 and comprises 21,800 glass plate negatives and around 3,000 prints.

Other images in the book come from the archives of Newton & Company (1870-1914): a firm of opticians and scientific instrument makers, who collected glass-plate negatives, and the archives of Millar & Harris, who were established in London as architectural photographers in 1932 and remained in business until 1981. In the 1930s and 1940s, they took photographs for publication in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar andArchitectural Review. Their archive, comprising 51,300 negatives and 33,500 prints, was acquired by English Heritage in 1991 and also form part of the Historic England Archive. A number of images from the archive of Country Life and the Royal Institute of British Architects have also been used to include certain especially interesting houses.

About the author Steven Brindle

Steven Brindle is a celebrated author and historian who has worked with English Heritage (now Historic England) since 1989, in four different roles. As Historian in the London Region, 1989-93; as Inspector of Ancient Monuments in the Crown Buildings Team, 1993-2001; as Inspector of Ancient Monuments for Greater London, 2001-8; as Senior Properties Historian in the Curatorial Division, 2008 – 2015. He is also regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on Brunel and is famed for discovering and saving Brunel’s ‘lost’ iron bridge at Paddington.