Above: Exterior view of Strawberry Hill House from the gardens (Wikimedia Commons)
In 1747, Horace Walpole, politician, writer and antiquarian, bought five acres and a couple of run-down cottages on the banks of the Thames in rural Twickenham. Over the next years he expanded, ornamented, designed and collected to create his own personal gothic fantasy: Strawberry Hill House. It was new and weird and wonderful and a hundred percent Walpole. He opened it to the public and it was instantly the talk of the town, but it was also hugely influential – arguably the whole nineteenth century gothic revival started with this modest villa. Today, it remains pretty much as he intended. It is still weird and wonderful and a visit there challenges everything you ever thought you knew about gothic revival architecture.
It is easy to dismiss Strawberry Hill as an eccentric’s flight of fancy: the exterior is a mish-mash of pointed arch windows, turrets, pinnacles and crenellations which looks like no medieval building you’ve ever seen. The white painted walls, often likened to a wedding cake, seem too decorative and dainty to fit our Dracula-influenced idea of ‘gothic’. The windows glow with random pieces of stained glass, acquired for colour not historical accuracy. Like Walpole’s celebrated 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto, which he claimed was a rediscovered translation of a sixteenth century Italian manuscript, Strawberry Hill feels like a kind of Disney-land pastiche. Arguably the most gothic thing about it is the irregularity, as the structure was expanded piecemeal over a thirty-year period.
Yet Walpole, and his designer-friends John Chute and Richard Bentley, took themselves seriously and their interiors drew on precise examples of tombs and church decoration. The Round Tower fireplace, designed by Robert Adam, was based on Edward the Confessor’s tomb; fan vaulting was inspired by Henry VII’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey and the staircase design comes directly from Rouen Cathedral. Walpole was also an obsessive collector. Younger son of a prime minister, and eventual earl of Orford, he made a two-year Grand Tour of Europe, collecting ideas, artefacts and inspiration as he went. Whilst most of his contemporaries sought out classical antiquities, Walpole had eclectic tastes. Strawberry Hill was crammed with thousands of objects which ranged from Greek vases to contemporary portraiture, from oddities like a lock of Edward IV’s hair, to bespoke pieces of furniture.
The villa had a split personality, part domestic, part display. You come first to the stairwell, all gothic gloom and grey, but many of the rooms are feel light, cosy, genteel. Walpole’s study is positively cell-like, its oppressive green lattice wallpaper which was originally covered by hundreds of paintings, making it seem even more compact than it is. The Blue Bedroom is dominated by its four-poster, the painting above the fireplace angled because Walpole’s elaborate choice of frame was slightly too large. The elegant proportions of the Great Parlour, dominated by family portraits, seem perfect for a polite social gathering. Yet Walpole designed a whole room around his collection of Holbein copies, with carved screen, intricate ceiling and lilac walls. The Tribune, his Cabinet of Curiosities for his most treasured items, is a little domed octagon of peppermint green with a delicate filigree of gold – it feels like walking into a Faberge egg. And the Long Gallery is pure theatre, shamelessly gaudy, bordering on kitsch with repeated angled reflections like a fairground Hall of Mirrors.
In 1842, a fire-sale denuded the house and dispersed the collection, much of which has since made its way to the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale. It was just one of the ignominies which befell Strawberry Hill in the two centuries after Walpole’s death. By the early 2000s the interior of the house was in a state of severe disrepair: it was placed on the UNESCO list of endangered heritage with an estimated £12 million needed to stabilize crumbling plaster, damaged papier mâché and rotting wood. Thankfully, it was a place well-loved by a small group of dedicated campaigners and the restoration, completed in 2012 is a triumph.
It is also ongoing. You can wander freely through the house, with a handout floorplan, but take time to talk to the wonderful volunteer room stewards and you learn about the difficulties of recreating the bedroom’s rich blue paint, the active embroidery group, the replanting of the gardens and the determined reacquisition of Strawberry Hill treasures. Hogarth’s portrait of the young Walpole, delicate and effete, was acquired in 2022. This summer sees the return of a bronze bust of Caligula gifted to Walpole in 1767 and sold off in the 1842 sale. Where they can’t get things back, clever use is made of reproductions and an ongoing relationship with Dulwich Picture Gallery has increased the display of pictures with over fifty on long term loan.
You need to bring your imagination with you when you visit Strawberry Hill. Nowadays, it is rather forlornly marooned in suburbia, deprived of its river views, shorn of its parkland which once extended to forty-six acres, penned in by traffic on one side and by unsympathetic later buildings on the other. At present it is partly swathed in scaffolding, and its pristine white exterior could already do with a lick of paint. In the absence of most of its original treasures the interior can have a slightly melancholy feel. You need to bring your imagination, but in a way that is entirely appropriate because the house would not exist at all without the vision of its creator and the determination of those who saved, and lovingly restored, it. Walk through the replanted lime grove, sit on the recreated ‘shell’ seat, which is pure Walpole, and you could almost be an eighteenth-century visitor marveling at this outlandish oddity of a building. Let yourself get carried away by the ambition and the enthusiasm which created it and restored it. The love people have for the place is palpable and infectious.
Strawberry Hill is easy to get to: there’s a free car park but it is only a short walk from the train station of the same name.
There’s an entrance fee of £14.50 (concessions available). It is closed on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. There is also a café which serves excellent and very reasonably priced coffee.
It is also within easy reach a number of other houses: Marble Hill about 1.5 miles upstream is restrained and classical. From there a ferry across the river takes you to the imposing seventeenth century red brick of Ham House, whilst Osterley Park, about three miles north is Robert Adam at his most grand and austere. A trip to any of them proves just how excitingly innovative Strawberry Hill House was, and still is today.
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Catriona Miller is an independent art historian and writer on art based in the UK. She has taught and lectured on all aspects of art history and is currently researching women artists in British collections and issues of nationalism and identity in nineteenth-century landscape painting.
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