London's 'Golden Mile': The Great Houses of the Strand, 1550–1650

"This is a book I only came across about a month ago. It’s a beautifully produced book by Yale University Press. They always produce rather sumptuous books. It’s also a piece of detective work, about the great buildings that were created on the Strand between roughly the 1550s through to the 1650s. The early part sees Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the English Reformation , when a new class of rising Protestant bureaucrats—the Cecils, the Howards, Thomas Cromwell —follow Henry VIII’s lead when he takes over Thomas Wolsey’s Whitehall Palace and makes it the centre of government. The people around him, newly enriched by the dissolution of the monasteries and other transfers of the land, decide to make their physical presence felt in these houses—they call them ‘houses’, but they’re really palaces. There are eleven of them, and they link the government part of London, which is Whitehall, and Westminster, by means of this 100-meter ribbon to the legal and business world of the City. These extraordinary houses owe something to European patterns, but are also English in their way. The great tragedy is that almost nothing of them remains. There’s an arch on the Victorian Embankment from one of the houses but they disappeared mainly during the civil wars. The first of these houses was in the middle of the Strand and was Somerset House, built in 1547—not the Somerset House that stands there now. This was built on the orders of Edward Seymour who became Lord Protector, the brother of Jane Seymour, who’d married Henry VIII. This grand building became the blueprint for the other 10 houses. It’s ironic that Seymour was this great Protestant figure: the house ended up being the residence of four queens, three of whom were Catholic. Elizabeth I lived there before she became queen, but so did Anne of Denmark, Henrietta Maria and Catherine of Braganza. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This very grand building set the mark for all the others. Guerci tries to recreate them, using floorplans, descriptions, and particularly Wenceslaus Hollar’s fantastic drawings and illustrations of this period. Wenceslaus Hollar was a Czech/Bohemian illustrator who came over to London and was one of the great visual chroniclers of early modern London. We have his drawings and one particularly illuminating example is a bird’s eye view of Covent Garden and the Strand, which tells us a lot. The book is brilliantly structured. Once we get through the introduction, we see each house going from east to west. Somerset House is the third of these. He includes the oldest of the Strand houses, the Savoy Palace. All of these palaces were originally bishops’ inns. Two of them stood on the north side of the Strand, the nine others were on the south side, often with very elaborate riverside terraces, with enormous gardens where one could enter from the Thames. Bedford House, which was built by Edward Russell, the third Earl of Bedford, had this enormous garden at the back, which extended into Covent Garden, and the fourth Earl left a remarkable legacy of Palladian buildings. Palladio was, of course, the great inspiration for Inigo Jones, who was the first man to bring Palladian classicism to England, with the Covent Garden Piazza, and his St. Paul’s Church. Guerci stresses the difficulty of reconstructing these lost palaces. It’s incredibly difficult to do. It was the Civil War and its aftermath which eventually led to the demolition of the Golden Mile. Now there is the Embankment, King’s College London, the Savoy Hotel and an endless number of chain shops that ends right about Charing Cross Station. All that is left are the names on the streets—Russell, Bedford, Henrietta. It’s not built on the plan. It’s just built on the site. The most astonishing thing of all is how little is left. There are almost no traces. In fact, I was walking up there, having read the book, and was trying to recreate something and it’s quite difficult to see any kind of legacy that’s been left there by these houses. They’re like butterflies that emerged and then disappeared. It’s quite extraordinary. And this book is something of a revelation because most of us don’t realise just what architectural wonders were there. The break with Rome seems to me to be the real revolutionary moment in English history. That was when England becomes different. And these buildings were symbolic of a changing of the guard. The Catholic Church was out. Its bishops were out. This was a kind of secularisation in governance. They were very capable men, crucial to the way in which the English state was reimagined. These houses are symbolic of that."