The Road of Eltham leads to the Palace of Excess

As you leave Mottingham station, in the deep slumber of South London suburbia, an advertisment promises that nearby can be found THE HOME OF 1930s HOLLYWOOD GLAMOUR. Obviously one would have assumed said home to be in Hollywood, but as you go up the hill towards it, you realise this is just another facet of London make-believe- pretending the Crystal Palace transmitter is the Eiffel Tower, that the Isle of Dogs is Ridley Scott’s LA, and that West India Dock is Dubai. This goes back very far indeed, to Inigo Jones bringing elegance to the Saxon savages hundreds of years ago.



Eltham Palace, a 1930s graft onto a 15th century Tudor pile, evokes more the historical pick & mix wrongly designated as a new phenomenon in the 1980s. The first thing you notice when you go in is an incredible Moderne pod, presumably where visitors would wait to be received on sleek furniture while admiring the historical incongruities of a marquetry mural, showing cruise liners and Vikings inexplicably side by side. Outside of this deco rotunda, you find rooms done in whichever historicist style currently favoured, in this case some ersatz Dutch and Italian bedrooms (with the telephones and radio speakers secreted in imaginative places), though the sinister ambience of the moderne pervades them nonetheless.



This is the period of Le Regle de Jeu, and of an aristocracy in sympathy with whatever might keep the damn Bolshies out of power, enjoying their fripperies before the crash comes. A quick look at the book collection uncovers Apologia of an Imperialist, and naturally Benito Mussolini’s My Autobiography. Surrounding the building are the somewhat homoerotic statues popularised by Mussolini’s New Rome, such as a lone soldier with an attractively bent sword. Aptly, there's a fantastically baroque argument here that the entire house is a complicated game played by the designer at the expense of the owners.