On January 30, 1875, The Illustrated London News published three views of the remains of Northumberland House on the Strand. The London home of the Dukes of Northumberland, it had occupied the western corner of the Strand for almost three decades, but was demolished to make way for nineteenth-century developments of the city. In his comprehensive survey of the homes of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland, Adriano Aymonino reproduces the image in his concluding chapter to signify the sad demise of a long history of art, design, and architectural patronage by these two influential British aristocrats. However, the image also provides a useful introduction to this review of Aymonino’s and Guerci’s extremely important studies, as it represents themes of destruction and reconstruction, lost, and rediscovered historical spaces, that appear to have motivated and guided both studies.

While Aymonino’s book focuses on the main residences of Hugh Smithson the 1st Duke of Northumberland (1714/15–1786) and his wife Elizabeth Seymour the 1st Duchess of Northumberland (1716–1776), a study that encompasses Alnwick Hall in the North East of England to Syon House in the South, Manolo Guerci’s investigation focuses on the concentration of large houses, ranged along the Strand, and dating from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. Northumberland House connects both studies, although Guerci’s interests are in the earlier history of the house and its inhabitants, Henry Howard the 1st Earl of Northampton (1540–1614) who built the house ‘from scratch’ to Algernon Percy, 10th Earl of Northumberland (1602–1668) who ‘completely transformed’ it in the 1640s. He notes that of the Strand houses, Northumberland House was: ‘one of the first to be erected, one of the last to disappear’ (p. 195). The word ‘disappear’ is pertinent and revealing of the sense of absence created by these lost buildings and interiors, which both authors cast over their subjects and which acts as a significant element of their methodologies.