Strawberry Hill

Just occasionally, we completely underestimate a house before visiting.

Strawberry Hill, the overwhelmingly intricate house built by Horace Walpole in stages across the 18th Century, is one such house. We knew before visiting that the house was bristling with the English Mysteries, but we assumed they were copied from existing designs with a minimum of understanding. The house is often described as a "gothic revival", although the style really does not belong to any movement, and simply borrows motifs heavily from older styles such as the Perpendicular.

What we actually found was the explosive mind of a man who not only understood the Mysteries in every detail, but was subverting them at every turn in an angry rebellion at an order that sought to exclude nonconformists. Details are deliberately wrong, ornamentation is suffocatingly dense, and the practicalities of living within a space seem to have been cast aside almost entirely.

What Walpole has left us is a reminder to temper artistic visions with humanity. The cultural wealth of England is far too valuable to be the preserve of an elite few.