East India House: Visualising Lost Interiors

Abstract

This article argues that an analysis of the historical and architectural significance of India House, the London headquarters of the East India Company, can yield new insights into histories of office design and employee management. Utilising company documents, including floor plans, letters, diaries, committee minutes, and a handful of published accounts, it juxtaposes the distinct careers of two employees: the essayist and poet Charles Lamb, who toiled in the Accountant’s Office, and the philosopher John Stuart Mill, who worked in the Office of the Examiner of Indian Correspondence. In so doing, it shows how India House between 1800 and 1857 occupied a crucial transitional stage in the history of office design; relates the spatial configurations of these two offices to different governing rationalities of the workplace; and offers a visual semblance of areas of the East India Company’s headquarters that were vital to its operations but have gone largely undocumented.