These volumes describe Soho, the most famous of London's cosmopolitan quarters. The area covered is defined largely by Wardour Street, Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road, and includes Soho Square, Leicester Square, and part of Cambridge Circus. Many of the streets here were first built up in the late 17th century under the building speculators Dr Nicholas Barbon and Richard Frith. Some fine Georgian houses are described and illustrated, for example No. 1 Greek Street and 76 Dean Street. Many well-known West End theatres are also found here.

An account of the history and buildings of these two prominent London establishments, from their origins in the seventeenth century to the twentieth century.

Covent Garden has a special significance as the birth-place of modern town planning in London. Inigo Jones's Italianate Piazza, designed in the 1630s for the 4th Earl of Bedford, was unlike anything the capital had seen before, and provided the prototype for the laying-out of London's suburban estates for centuries to come. Based on a detailed study of the surviving fabric and the Bedford Estate's archives, this volume recounts the story of the Piazza's evolution (and eventual redevelopment), including the building of St Paul's Church, the area's principal monument. In addition to the Piazza and surrounding streets, the volume also describes the buildings of the Covent Garden Market, at the time the nation's principal market for horticultural produce, since removed to Nine Elms, Battersea.

This is first of the Survey's four volumes to cover Kensington, an area synonymous with Victorian architecture. It concerns the area to the north of Kensington High Street, extending as far as Kensal Green, where large-scale building development took place between the 1820s and 1880s. Here can be traced in some detail the evolution of London's nineteenth-century suburban housing. Among the many examples described are the fashionable Italianate villas of the 1820s and '30s in Campden Hill and Holland Park; the opulent large mansions of 'Millionaires Row' in Kensington Palace Gardens; and the red-brick 'Domestic Revival' artists' houses of the 1860s and after in the Melbury Road area. Victorian ecclesiastical design can also be studied in its many variants, in the area's churches, chapels and convents, including the Greek Revival architecture of Kensal Green Cemetery.

At the core of this volume is a study of the estate in South Kensington and Westminster acquired under the auspices of Prince Albert by the Commissioners for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and developed as a remarkable cultural centre for the applied arts and sciences. In many ways the great sequence of world-famous institutions described here - such as the Victorian and Albert Museum, the National History Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, and the Imperial Institute - is a memorial to the Prince Consort's vision. The book sets out his role in the creation of South Kensington as a centre for art and scholarship, and the parts played by others, such as Queen Victoria herself, Captain Francis Fowke, and Sir Henry Cole (the dynamic first Superintendent of the South Kensington Museum). The High Victorian memorial eventually erected to the prince in Hyde Park is also considered. Part of the Commissioners' estate was used for house building, and the volume describes the development here and on adjoining lands of the great ranges of Italianate stucco mansions in and around Queen's Gate, Elvaston Place and Cromwell Road, which today give South Kensington its architectural flavour. The emergence after 1870 of the red-brick 'Domestic Revival' idiom in reaction to all this 'builders' classical'-style housing is here exemplified by half-a-dozen important houses and flats by Richard Norman Shaw.

The Grosvenor family's large estate in northern Mayfair, for two centuries a by-word for wealth and fashion, is described in two volumes of the Survey. This first volume, a general history, traces the administrative and architectural history of the estate from its acquisition by the family in 1677 and its development and redevelopment from the 1720s onwards around the centrepiece of Grosvenor Square, and analyses the reasons for its pre-eminence among London's great private estates. Detailed accounts of the buildings are provided in the companion volume 40.

This volume completes the Survey's study of the Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair by looking in detail at its rich and varied architectural and building heritage. From the fine eighteenth-century houses of Brook Street and Grosvenor Street to the smart inter-war flats of Park Lane, the Grosvenor Estate offers a compendium of some of the best English urban architecture, often by leading practitioners, from Colin Campbell (who lived here in a house of his own design) and Robert Taylor in the eighteenth century, to Lutyens and Detmar Blow in the twentieth. Among the larger buildings described, both standing and demolished, is Grosvenor House, the Grosvenor family's own London mansion, the internationally renowned Claridge's Hotel and the American Embassy's controversial post-war building on the west side of Grosvenor Square.

This, the third of the Survey's four volumes devoted to Kensington, describes the southernmost part of the old parish, covering both sides of Brompton Road and then continuing westward between Old Brompton Road and Fulham Road as far as Brompton Cemetery.

This volume completes the Survey's study of Kensington. It describes the expansion of building development south and west towards Earl's Court from the original late-17th-century 'Old Court Suburb' around Kensington Square and Kensington High Street. The area has a great variety of house-types and architectural styles: surviving 1680s houses in Kensington Square; brick-and-stucco Regency terraces in and around Edwardes Square; George & Peto's large and flamboyant Flemish-inspired brick-and-terracotta family homes in Harrington and Collingham Gardens; and later mansion flats. In addition to the residential architecture, the volume also traces the history of the commercial and light-industrial quarter to the west, near the Kensington Canal and West London Railway; the fashionable shopping area on the south side of the High Street, with its well-known department stores, such as Barkers and Derry & Toms; and a rich collection of churches and chapels. The volume ends with a retrospective chapter, considering some of the themes and building trends common to Southern Kensington as a whole.

The dockland parish of All Saints', Poplar, encompasses the ancient hamlet of Poplar itself, the old shipbuilding centre of Blackwall, and the former industrial districts of Millwall and Cubitt Town. Poplar's story is one of development and redevelopment on both the grand and the comparatively small scale, driven in the nineteenth century by mercantile interests and manufacturing, and after the Second World War by de-industrialization and the obsolescence of the Thames-side docks. The East and West India and Millwall Docks system is discussed in detail, together with the riverside wharves and works, and the massive regeneration, still in progress, which followed the creation of the Isle of Dogs Enterprise Zone in 1982. Among important individual buildings described is the seventeenth-century church of St Matthias, a rarity from the Interregnum, built for the East India Company. A major subject is public housing, which includes the famous Lansbury Estate, built in association with the 1951 Festival of Britain.