INTRODUCTION

Pinning down the essential ingredients that comprise a London interior is much like trying to reduce the vast metropolis into one ordered architectural reference point – a near impossible task. Just as the city blends traditional Victorian and Georgian housing stock with new builds, converted warehouses, social housing, tower blocks and landmark post-war estates, so its interiors comprise a fusion of decorative influences. The relaxed elegance pioneered by Colefax and Fowler in the mid-twentieth century, the softly modern, design-led rooms of Terence Conran a decade or two later, and the restrained schemes of interior architects such as John Minshaw have each made their mark. More recently, the capital’s interiors have favoured a return to the playful, loosened up look it has long flirted with: blowsy florals, clashing colours, vibrant prints and plenty of frills and fringing. Add to that a preference for natural materials including timber, rattan or marble and a delight in the exotic, from Ikat designs to bold geometrics and you have something approximating London living: loose, imperfect, unpretentious and just a little bit rebellious.

The questions of what makes a home, why its interiors matter and how living in a city plays out are all at the heart of this volume. More intrinsic is the issue of how we live in London itself as opposed to other key capitals such as Paris, Rome or Madrid. What makes an interior belong uniquely to its city and why? The answer lies not so much in a sense of uniformity but in the reverse: behind every ubiquitous London terrace lies a deeply individual home; beyond each formerly industrial space, an eye for adaptability and behind every high rise or Victorian house conversion, a desire to live among the fray. London is not laid out in formation like some cities, nor is it easy to read. A series of villages stitched together over time, every borough has its own personality, from the urban appeal of Clerkenwell to the gentile, sometimes staid, streets of Chelsea. Social housing mingles with affluent, traffic-packed streets with quiet mews. Every area is subject to unexpected changes of fortune: some, such as Notting Hill, were once coveted, then neglected and now considered deeply desirable, others, formerly ignored, now under the spotlight. 1930s homes on the outer western reaches of the city offer a pull to growing families once located in more central neighbourhoods and long overlooked period properties in East London are the subject of renewed appeal.

The city’s interiors reflect this spontaneous approach – on first glance, unlike our European neighbours, it can be hard to spot any follow through or theme – botanical prints