Discover a Masterpiece of Gothic Revival: Strawberry Hill House

People tend to think of the 18th century as the age of reason, a world of scientific order, of architectural symmetry and classical columns. While the rest of England was looking toward the ruins of Rome and Greece, Horace Walpole was turning his back on classicism. This is the story of Strawberry Hill, a masterpiece of design that engaged the imagination creatively and paved the way for the great Gothic revival of the 19th century. The two small properties that Horace Walpole found here in 1747 were transformed by him in the next several decades into something quite different, this spectacular powerhouse of Gothic culture, of architecture, stained glass, painting, literature. He lived in the middle of the 18th century, an age that we've come to call the age of reason for its scientific worldview, its progress in technology and transportation, but he showed us a different way of seeing the world. Strawberry Hill is a manifesto for the imagination and it's powered art and culture for the last 250 years. In 1747, Horace Walpole happened upon a modest, unassuming residence in Twickenham. Locally, it was known by the unglamorous name of Chopped Straw Hall. While his contemporaries obsessed over perfect symmetry and Greek and Roman proportions, Walpole embraced the irregular. This was a revolution. Its Gothic reimagined a playful collage of chimneys, turrets and arched windows that defy the rigid rules of the age of reason. Here, he used architecture and nature to blur the lines between a 1700s villa and a medieval monastery. He's telling you that this is sacred ground for the imagination. It's a playful, imaginative landscape designed to unsettle the senses and prepare the mind for what lies within. By taking the two small properties and merging them, he began a decades-long project to transform a humble home into a grand tour of England within his own walls. But this hall plays a different game. This is a darker space. It's lined with paper. It feels like it's a theatrical stage set. It was the architecture of the imagination and it's focused on this pretend Gothic lantern which had a single candle in the middle of it. And in the dark evenings, the light from that candle would flicker shadows within this space. And that theatre would take us on a journey into the Gothic imagination. We leave the flickering shadows of the hall and begin our ascent. As we climb, the atmosphere shifts from paper walls and candlelight into the medieval past. The journey upwards takes us deeper into Walpole's subconscious. The playful silhouettes of the exterior are replaced by the weight of history. Walpole's imagination was fuelled not by the sunlight and the ancient classical history of Greece and Rome, but by the shadowy north and the native history of England. At Strawberry Hill, there was no truly old house to play with, but he wanted to conjure the medieval past. And how would he do that? It's by thinking of the principles, the idea, the atmosphere, the qualities of truly old buildings, so many of which had been wrecked in the Civil War a century earlier. But he thought that old castles would have a mixture of warmth and intimacy in small spaces, as well as gloominess from their small windows. He mixed that warmth and the gloominess into a single word, gloom. And that's one of the driving principles behind Strawberry Hill, using candles, creating niches, nooks and crannies like this in which to display things in low light so that your imagination can be turned through a few relics of battles fought centuries ago into the stories of entire families and dynasties, illustrated with heraldry in the walls. Strawberry Hill's playfulness then becomes quite important. It's not a grand tour of Italy and Greece, but it does embark on a grand tour of England. Walpole sought a leap of logic into a more informed approach, and so he created the Strawberry Committee with two people, Richard Bentley, a skilled engraver and draftsperson with an antiquarian sensibility, and also John Shoot, who lived in an old house with Tudor origins amongst the relics of the past. This committee would scrutinise all of the designs for Strawberry Hill, a part of a staircase maybe, or a door, or a fireplace like this. This one was designed by Richard Bentley. Gone are the relics of classical columns, and here are the kind of things you'd find on genuine medieval tombs. Although much of this remains imaginary, it is still a playful essay on Gothic forms. It was a leap of logic that Walpole took to believe in design by committee. Here, of all places, it worked. This wasn't just decoration. It was an antiquarian impulse that started here and changed the way we look at the past. By engaging the imagination creatively, Walpole went beyond building a home to lay the foundation for the entire Gothic revival of the 19th century. The library is Walpole's best room, as he called it, and the most Gothic of the rooms at Strawberry Hill. The bookcases are very three-dimensional. The joinery is a step change from simply painting Gothic effects on the walls. Instead, they're functional bookcases studied from genuine medieval monuments. This case is from an engraving of the entrance into the east end of old St. Paul's Cathedral, lost in the fire of 1666 and given new life again. Over the fireplace is a late 13th century canopy over a monument in Westminster Abbey, combined with another later tomb design from Canterbury Cathedral. And this study of the medieval past involved serious application of measurement and drawing and replication. It's an antiquarian impulse, which is important, and it starts here at Strawberry Hill. This is part of the Grand Tour of England. This new three-dimensionality wasn't just a physical support for the books in the bookcases. It provided a kind of reassuring scaffolding for Walpole to be able to insert the story ancestry in this national picture, using the walls and windows and ceilings that surround them. So far at Strawberry Hill, we've seen Gothic architecture, stained glass, painting, Gothic furniture, and the display of historic objects within that principle that Walpole cultivated of gloom. That was key to so much that he did. It gave him, through shifting silhouettes and shadows, leaps of imagination, which imagined new realms of the past. And that led at Strawberry Hill to the creation of a brand new cultural stream. Here, Walpole created the Gothic novel. In writing this book, he birthed a genre. Every haunted castle, every flickering candle, and every supernatural mystery in literature finds its origin right here, born from the gloom of Strawberry Hill. The power of Strawberry Hill to charge the imagination and feed the subconscious was felt very keenly one night by Walpole when he awoke from a nightmare. He'd imagined a giant living in a castle. Those shifting shapes and shadows in the light of a candle flame had conjured to his mind a cast of people who were, some of them were crushed by a giant helmet, others saw a huge foot appearing through a door. All of this, outpourings of the subconscious, were put down on paper in the shape of the Castle of Otranto, the very first Gothic novel. In the course of the next century and a half, we would have Frankenstein and Count Dracula. All of them saw this as the originator and the font of the Gothic literary tradition. So Strawberry Hill had the power certainly to charge the imagination, but it also had a reputation that was building for people who wanted to come and share in that experience. The next task for Walpole was to put his quill to paper and write the guidebook to explain this house to a willing audience. Strawberry Hill was a must-see destination for everyone from foreign royalty to the merely curious. Walpole handled this vein with characteristic flair, publishing one of the world's first guidebooks to a house. He understood that every great theatre needs an audience. To satisfy the growing crowds and his own expanding vision, he began to build northward. This great gallery was built between 1761 and 63. It's rather like a long gallery in an Elizabethan or Jacobean house designed to display portraits and spur conversations, and the Walpoles had many portraits by Peter Lely and Antony van Dyck. There was their heraldry, but looking upwards you see an extraordinary vision. It is a papier-mâché version of some of the vaults from Westminster Abbey. It's a bizarre conflation of building types on one level, the country house and one of England's greatest churches, but the effect is undoubtedly spectacular and the highlight for many people who'd heard by this time of Strawberry Hill's reputation spreading far and wide. If the great gallery was the public face of Strawberry Hill, a golden stage for its many visitors, the room at the end of the hall was Walpole's final, most personal statement. It took 10 years to finish, and though Walpole originally intended it as a bedroom, it evolved into his ultimate entertaining suite. Here the straight lines of the long gallery give way to the curve of the tower, wrapping the visitor in a 360 degree gothic embrace. This is the round drawing room. It's one of the last parts of the house to be finished. It took 10 years and was completed in 1772. Walpole wanted it to be a bedroom, but during that time it changed and became one of the suites of the house. The fireplace is undoubtedly the focus, and it's a surprising contribution by Robert Adam, the great Scottish neoclassical architect, who sought some inspiration from the tomb of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. You can see in the spiral columns in this trefoil arch some of that inspiration, but Walpole dismissed it as Mr Adam's gingerbread and snippets of embroidery. It's extraordinary that he did dismiss something that was in fact the most expensive fitting that he commissioned, but then this is a house based on unreason. The ceiling above us is taken from one of the rose windows of old St Paul's Cathedral. Imagine taking a cathedral window and laying it down in a totally new context. It hardly mattered. It's what Walpole was aiming for all along. It's an act of rebellion. It's a manifesto for unreason. It is a work of theatre. It's all of those things, and Walpole retained that creative energy until the end. Horace Walpole did something more than just decorate. He built for the subconscious. From the calculated gloom of the entrance hall to the golden soaring vaults of the great gallery, he transformed wood, paper, plaster and paint into a landscape of the mind. The age of reason was finally defeated by the age of imagination. Every shadow was a romantic story. Every tomb-inspired fireplace was a link to a national past that Walpole felt was slipping away but could be recovered. It was like stepping inside a jewel box of relics and dreams. This was a theatre with a creative dialogue of England's past. It paved the way to the Gothic revival of the 19th century and it's inspired people for the last 250 years. Walpole didn't just want a house, he wanted to create a spectacle.