A lot of London has been lost. German bombs didn’t do anything like as much damage as the energy produced by the huge, ever-expanding metropolis itself. In the late 19th century, London was the richest city in the world, boiling with plutocrats flinging up new mansions in the Kensington ‘suburbs’ or drastically refurbishing old ones in Mayfair and Belgravia. Clifford’s Inn, a remarkable medieval survival, was pulled down in Edwardian times. Nash’s Regent Street would have been one of the architectural wonders of the world had it survived in its original form, an astonishing urban scheme stretching all the way from Carlton House Terrace to Regent’s Park. But it was carelessly chucked on the rubbish heap: more retail space was required and undesirable persons were congregating in the arcades. Priceless aristocratic mansions, such as Devonshire House, designed by William Kent, were breezily bulldozed in the 1920s, when their owners could no longer afford the upkeep, and replaced by hideous blocks of flats.

Nothing is so thoroughly lost, as the author Steven Brindle points out, as a lost interior. Arrangements of furniture, fabrics and knick-knacks are by their nature ephemeral. If any trace remains from a century ago, it will be only because the interiors were photographed, which was not common practice at the time. Fortunately, though, the wealthy sometimes proudly memorialised their interiors. The architectural photographers Bedford Lemere & Co were one of the first to be engaged for this purpose. Subsequently, Millar & Harris became prominent in this field, using more modern techniques, such as celluloid film and artificial lighting.

The archives of both these firms are now with Historic England and form a substantial source for the pictures in this book. At first glance, there might appear to be a certain uniformity to the images. The older Lemere pictures, taken in natural light and with long exposure times, have the aura of police photos of murder scenes. Nor can the viewer make an instant comparison of then and now, as is possible when looking at exterior shots.

But this is no bad thing. The photographs require to be looked at carefully, although you might struggle to keep the weighty tome on your knee. The accompanying text is rigorous and scholarly, with amusing touches, pointing out, for instance, the dust on the piano at Stanmore Hall in Harrow, a rare example of a house with an interior in which William Morris had a hand. ‘The family must have been away,’ Brindle remarks.

There are ten chapters and the photographs date roughly from the 1870s to the late 1940s. The houses of royalty, aristocracy and plutocracy all feature. The choice is wide, as are the styles: Arts and Crafts, Art Deco and so on. Interestingly, only a few of the interiors included date from before the 19th century, the most notable being that of Holland House, which retained Jacobean elements until it was destroyed by bombs in the Second World War.

Every reader will have their favourite, or their favourite horror. White Lodge in Richmond Park was the home of Princess Mary Adelaide, the larger-than-life mother of Queen Mary. Her boudoir seethed with statuettes and furniture arranged in barricades, as if a siege was expected. Her daughter’s sitting room has a cheap-looking white-painted desk heaped up with unframed photographs, terrible cane seating and a collection of fans on an odd shelf going round the room, midway between the floor and the ceiling.

Even non-royal people arranged their rooms strangely. Why did Lindsley Peters, a 34-year-old engineer, ruin his drawing room at 25 Bedford Square by plonking an enormous billiard table in the middle of it? At least when Lemere visited the property for a second time in 1912, about ten years after he’d photographed it for Peters, the actress Florence St John had taken over the house and got the drawing room onto a much better footing – with a statue on a plinth, a grand piano, a potted palm and vases on brackets all over the walls.

Who knew that London was ever Nazified? Albert Speer remodelled 7 Carlton House Terrace, the German embassy, for Joachim von Ribbentrop in 1937 on Nazi aesthetic principles. The stair carpet had a swastika border and a fireplace had a swastika frieze. The reception room was lined with travertine to resemble the waiting room of an Italian railway station – a tribute, perhaps, to Hitler’s ally Mussolini.

Flat 40, Devonshire House, which was erected above Green Park station on the site of the demolished Kent building, is one of the most avant-garde interiors on view here. Completed in 1927, it was the home of Sir Albert Levy, a tobacco millionaire. ‘Flat’ is a misleading term. These were enormous premises, magnificent but terrifying, stone-lined and austere – the polar opposite of cosy.

Does it matter that so many interiors were lost? The great aristocratic houses of the West End undoubtedly had what we would today call ‘heritage status’. The destruction of the unique rococo interiors of Norfolk House in St James’s Square was appalling. It’s some consolation that the Music Room can be seen in the V&A, where it was reassembled.

Quite a few of the interiors were created for forgotten bankers and industrialists by equally forgotten society decorating firms, which could produce rooms in a variety of styles as required – for instance, ‘Curzon Street Baroque’ and ‘Vogue Regency’. Others were more original. The home of General Sir Ian and Lady Jean Hamilton, 1 Hyde Park Gardens, had a black drawing room by Roger Fry. It should have been saved but could it have been? Preserve too much and there’s nowhere left for people to live. What London has tended to end up with is one or two examples of interiors from different periods. Some of the buildings housing them, such as the Linley Sambourne House in Kensington, are open to the public. Missing, as Brindle points out, are examples of Art Deco interiors. Too much was lost, so thank goodness for this marvellous book. But thank goodness, too, that one or two of these interiors didn’t survive.