Unbuilt Strawberry Hill

Lindfield, Peter ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8393-9344 (2022) Unbuilt Strawberry Hill. Shaun Tyas, Donington. ISBN 9781915774040

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Abstract

Horace Walpole (1717-97), the artistic son of Robert Walpole, the United Kingdom's first prime minister, began creating Strawberry Hill in Twickenham at the end of the 1740s. The house is now seen as the most significant, if not the very first, Gothic home made in Georgian Britain, though its contents were dispersed in a month-long auction in 1842. Peter Lindfield demonstrates that the villa emerged slowly from many unrealised or much-altered designs, plans and sketches, which survive today in the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University. These designs are here assessed and published together as a corpus for the first time.