Return to the Little Gothic House

It was all of nine years ago when London Gothic went to Horace Walpole's mansion by the Thames, Strawberry Hill, that wonderful camp confection where modern Gothic was born in the mid-1700s. The Strawberry Hill Trust had only just opened the house to visitors, and a couple of us who'd known it when it was still occupied by St Mary's College were a little disappointed by its bareness, all the Victorian furniture having been removed and nothing put in its place. We had to strain our imaginations to picture what it might be like when the Trust finally achieved its aim of restoring the entire place to what it had been like in 1797.

As I found on a repeat trip for a night-time opening last month, no such strain is required now. The walls are papered and painted, the furniture gilded and buffed, and the Trust has borrowed as much as it can of Walpole's long-dispersed collection to show in the mansion's rooms. Lurid and lavish, the restored Strawberry Hill is a bit like being slapped around the face by over-the-toppery, made all the more apparent on my visit by the presence not only of historical re-enacting volunteers (Horace Walpole wasn't nearly camp enough) but of a group of visitors in a variety of costumes which ranged from the Walpolean to about 1820 as far as I could gauge. We were not supposed to take photos because of all the loaned objects, but I sneaked a few. Look, they're small, you can't reproduce anything from them.