Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

This work reconstructs the so-called ‘Strand palaces’ – eleven great houses that once stood along the Strand in London. Between 1550 and 1650, this was the capital’s ‘Golden Mile’: home to a unique concentration of patrons and artists, and where England’s early-modern and post-Reformation elites jostled to establish themselves by building and furnishing new, secular cathedrals. The product of almost two decades of research, and benefitting from close archival investigation, this book brings together an incredible array of unpublished sources that sheds new light on one of the most important chapters in London’s architectural history, and on English architecture more broadly.