Millionaire Houses Along the Strand

The Strand, London

The Strand, a major street in the City of Westminster, London was, from the middle ages, the most prestigious place to live in London. Running from the Temple on the east to Charing Cross on the west (just as it does today), the Strand was strategically placed between two power centres: the City and Westminster. Furthermore, from the 1530s, leading courtiers and aristocrats acquired the magnificent medieval bishops’ inns and their spacious gardens, adapting the houses and beautifying the gardens as showpieces, visible to all who travelled on the Thames. Like the palaces along the Grand Canal in Venice, these great houses were seen as powerful expressions of the city’s wealth and grandeur. While most of these houses were on the south side of the Strand, Lord Burghley built a new house along the north side. A recently discovered plan of his house and garden is the most important source of information about the splendour and complexity of these houses and gardens, a short period in London’s history of true rus in urbe.

Paula Henderson, Architectural and Garden Historian

Paula Henderson has degrees in art history (University of Chicago, M.A.) and Ph.D. in architectural history from the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London). She lectures widely in Britain (where she lived for 43 years) and the United States and has published over 70 articles on English Houses and their landscapes. Her first book, The Tudor House and Garden: architecture and landscape in the 16^th and 17^th centuries (published by Yale University Press), won the Berger Prize for the outstanding contribution to the history of British art 2005. Francis Lincoln published Treehouses (co-authored with Adam Mornement), also in 2005. She is currently completing books on London gardens in the age of Shakespeare and on the Landscape as Art. She has taught courses for the Courtauld Institute of Art, and more recently for the V&A museum. She has lectured for the Paul Mellon Center for British Art, the Architectural Association, both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, Birkbeck college, Christie’s Education, The Inchbald School of Design, the V&A museum, the Tate Gallery, The Garden History Society, Sir John Soane’s Museum, among others. She led tours for the Courtauld Institute to Florence (‘Gardens of the Medici’) Debyshire (‘Elizabethan architecture’) and the Cotswolds (‘Gardens of the Cotswolds’). She is a Fellow of Society of Antiquaries of London and now splits her time between Nantucket, Massachusetts, and Williamsburg, Virginia.

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