Thomas Blaikie at Literary Review:
A lot of London has been lost. German bombs didn’t do anything like as much damage as the energy produced by the huge, ever-expanding metropolis itself. In the late 19th century, London was the richest city in the world, boiling with plutocrats flinging up new mansions in the Kensington ‘suburbs’ or drastically refurbishing old ones in Mayfair and Belgravia. Clifford’s Inn, a remarkable medieval survival, was pulled down in Edwardian times. Nash’s Regent Street would have been one of the architectural wonders of the world had it survived in its original form, an astonishing urban scheme stretching all the way from Carlton House Terrace to Regent’s Park. But it was carelessly chucked on the rubbish heap: more retail space was required and undesirable persons were congregating in the arcades. Priceless aristocratic mansions, such as Devonshire House, designed by William Kent, were breezily bulldozed in the 1920s, when their owners could no longer afford the upkeep, and replaced by hideous blocks of flats.
Nothing is so thoroughly lost, as the author Steven Brindle points out, as a lost interior.
more here.
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