This weighty book of lush interior shots selected and presented by Steven Brindle is a rare and delightful treat. London: Lost Interiors is an opportunity to glimpse inside the homes of London from a time well before it was common to photograph them – Victorian, Edwardian and early 20th century London. On top of that, about half the homes in it no longer exist, not to mention the fading and remodelling of the insides of those that do.
Popular ideas of what interior design in England was like between 1880 and 1940 come predominantly from period TV shows like Downton Abbey or Jeeves and Wooster. But these do not tell us how houses that were decorated and redecorated at the time genuinely looked.
Brindle’s book shows that historical decor trends are far more complex, more varied, and more particular than we might assume. For a start, the designers, architects and inhabitants were far more international that you would expect.
London: Lost Interiors taps into our growing fascination with other people’s homes, a fascination more recently supercharged by Instagram and other visual social media. The boundary between the public sphere and the private home is changing, since now complete strangers might “know us” through the way we choose and arrange things – our cushions, or recently, even the inside of the fridge.
Brindle makes the point that for those who lived in these homes too, interior style was a statement of identity aimed at their social world, which is smaller than an Instagram audience in many cases but critical to status and position nonetheless. Some of the later images in the book first appeared in the new print publications focused on lifestyle and fashion, like Country Life. Others, perhaps surprisingly, were taken purely for the pleasure of their owners, as a pleasing record of a home in its ideal state.
I like the idea of someone looking at a photograph of a space they actually inhabit. Brindle’s book offers valuable insight into how photography makes people conscious of their appearance and conscious of style. These are not snaps of a life lived. They are studies of the stage set for fashionable society life of lounging and dining.
Take the sitting room of 26 Grosvenor Square, light plays over comfortable chairs angled for conversation and optimal views of the giant palms and frescoes. Polished candle sticks await their cue. No humans present, and no sign of their recent activity. No personal bits and bobs. No mess.
What cannot be overlooked is the lack of “ordinary” lower middle-class and working-class homes in this book. London’s Museum of the Home in Shoreditch, which opened in the 1930s, offers a broader view of changing and varied home styles. But as Brindle points out, few photographs would have been taken of most people’s homes in the period because it was very expensive to do so.
One chapter focuses on “the middle class world”, but acknowledges that only 10% to 15% of Victorian and Edwardian people occupied this strata and they were closer to the landed gentry in economic capital than the middle class of today.
Read more: Cluttercore: Gen Z's revolt against millennial minimalism is grounded in Victorian excess
He also notes that these homes were labour intensive: crammed, polished, buffed, orderly and spotless. We may yearn for the grandeur, craftsmanship and commitment to style evident in these pages, but the sheer volume of stuff was only really manageable with staff.
For me, as a scholar of fashionable identities, this book is a seductive yet sobering reminder of how much our aesthetic ideals are shaped by mythologies of the “good life” that depend on having servants.
But something like our fascination with past elites and exotic style is also visible in these photographs from Victorian, Edwardian and early 20th century London. Interior elements demonstrate foreign travel, knowledge of new innovations and quirky, individual or eccentric taste. Politics aside, I wasn’t expecting to see the wealth of niche ideas that pepper these pages once you actually start focusing on individual images.
One “middle-class” home in Belgravia has walls sheathed in black velvet, and, below a dado rail, a spectacular wall-covering of overlapping fans. Another celebrates new lighting technology with a chain of bare electric lightbulbs set below a traditional painterly figurative frieze.
The pared-back minimalism of the 1920s and 1930s is all the more shockingly modern when seen, not in a commercial space or an architect’s house, but in the homes of people previously used to the “womb-like spell” of clutter and burgeoning decoration of the decades before.
Modernism’s break with the past in this book is as alarmingly refreshing as it might have been way back then. Take 5 Connaught Place, designed by Serge Chermayeff in 1937 for the extraordinarily sleek, sparse elegance we might expect of Le Corbusier, set within a Georgian London terrace.
In short, if you are captivated by curated, maximalist clutter, or less-is-more modernism, or indeed any of the distinctive and subtle, idiosyncratic visual languages in between, there is plenty of relevant history here to educate, complicate, delight and inspire. Brindle offers an intelligent and detailed text that brings the kaleidoscopic of pictures to life, invoking compelling stories of class and modern life along the way.
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Vanessa Brown does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
