The constellation of eighteenth-century houses and villas beside or near to the Thames, from Chiswick to the western limits of London, all open to visitors, constitutes a remarkable index of English taste. There were, of course, many more, particularly along the north bank of the river at Twickenham, where dowagers and poets lived cheek-by-jowl to gain a view of the Thames. We can perhaps regret the late nineteenth-­century destruction of Twickenham House itself, which had lost much of its land and appeal when the new railway could be heard and seen from the drawing-room windows. Next to it was Savile House, once occupied by Godfrey Kneller and then by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu at the time when her quarrel with her neighbour Alexander Pope first electrified the Twickenham air. We would have enjoyed seeing the two residences of the portrait painter Thomas Hudson who admired both the Palladian and the Gothic and indecisively built two houses, one in each style, facing one another across the road in aesthetic stalemate.  We can certainly regret the demolition in 1926 of Orleans House, survived only by James Gibbs’s octagonal room of 1720, now the Orleans House Gallery. But in spite of such destructions and various extensions, make-overs and accidents, as well as of innumerable changes of owners and tenants – it is hard to forget that, from the 1890s, Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House, to the north-east, was a ‘mental asylum’, while Marble Hill House was derelict – sufficient buildings remain to add substance to our image of the visual and cultural achievements of the period, in architecture, interior design and gardening, ranging from Queen Anne seemliness through the full Burlingtonian experience to the Regency. Several of these properties have in recent years undergone ambitious restorations, none more so than the gardens of Chiswick House with their attendant buildings and statuary.1 At the same time (2010), work on Strawberry Hill House at Twickenham was sufficiently advanced for it to be made more fully accessible to the public before the start of the final campaign, to begin later this year, of restoring the Holbein Chamber and further rooms at the top of the house.

Strikingly, Strawberry Hill contains virtually no contents. Many of Horace Walpole’s objects, furnishings and pictures (his ‘trumpery’ as he called them), dispersed in the notorious sale of 1842, were gathered from public and private collections for the exhibition shown in New Haven and London in 2010;2 there are hopes that some at least of these, or suitable equiv­alents, might be placed on loan to the house. But this should not, surely, be overdone. What a visitor now sees, with a clarity not possible in Horace Walpole’s occupancy, are the specific architectural styling and space of each of the extraordinarily contrasting rooms. The layout of the interior as developed by Walpole – its surprises, false starts and asymmetries, the moves from pokiness to an almost self-mocking grandeur in the re-gilded and re-damasked Gallery (‘I begin to be ashamed of my own magnificence’; Fig.I) – is laid bare in all its variety. There are no curtains, carpets and upholstery to muffle or obscure the skeleton of the rooms. Because of this, the fantasy is more rather than less apparent. The flimsy absurdity of

The Castle of Otranto, Walpole’s novel of 1764, written in the house, floats into almost every chamber. Walpole’s well-bred indifference to good taste, and the energy with which he pursued his imaginative reconstruction of the past, colour the whole interior. The restoration has disclosed all manner of original details as well as clarifying some of the later changes instigated by its nineteenth-century chatelaine, the almost too energetic Frances, Lady Waldegrave. The house is now freshly encased in an alarming but authentic white pebbledash, its chimneys and castellations rising above Twickenham’s polite suburbia as though Decimus Burton and Pugin had collaborated on some seaside villa.

Strawberry Hill has been a place of pilgrimage since Walpole’s own time. At first people simply turned up to see ‘the fairy castle’ and its contents. This became too much for the owner: ‘I shudder when the bell rings at the gate. It is as bad as keeping an inn’. Later, visitors were admitted on certain days with a timed ticket for a hefty one guinea. It is comparatively cheaper now but that element of pilgrimage retains its hold. The admirable restoration commemorates a great interior decorator and the finest writer of letters in the English language.

1    In contrast to Strawberry Hill and other restored and refurbished properties in the area, the Palace at Kew Gardens, under the auspices of Historic Royal Palaces, suffers from dismal lighting, irritating sound effects and attendants in fancy dress.
2    For a review of the exhibition and further details of the restoration carried out by the Strawberry Hill Trust, see S.S. Jervis: ‘Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill’, in this Magazine, 152 (2010), pp.321–24.