ABSTRACT
By around 1660, only about a quarter of London’s population lived within the city walls, while the eastern dockland suburbs contained a third of London’s inhabitants, and Westminster and the suburbs south of the Thames each accommodated a quarter. During the early-seventeenth century far more buildings of merit were developed by private patrons than by the monarch himself, and numerous examples are to be found in both central London and in its outer environs. A completely new venture was Northumberland House, the London home of the Percy family from 1640 to 1866. With the economic and social ascendancy of the merchant in the early sixteenth century, the number of grand houses constructed in London was undoubtedly dwarfed by a proliferation of less prosaic dwellings of traditional Gothic design particularly on the edge of the City of Bishopsgate, Fleet Street, Holborn and around Charing Cross.
