As part of the Richmond Literature Festival, for the first time the stories of the historic houses and gardens of the Arcadian Thames have been brought together in one fine volume; the lost houses as well as those that have been saved.
Strawberry Hill is “an open grove through which you see a field which is bounded by a serpentine wood of all kinds of trees and flowering shrubs and flowers.”
Horace Walpole was the son of Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. He devoted his life to politics, the arts, antiquarianism, history, collecting and authorship and, from 1749, the creation of Strawberry Hill, his summer villa.
Speakers from two famous West London properties explore the relationships of love, politics and ultimately power and ponder the question of whether love is indeed ‘treacherous’.
Horace Walpole famously described his house at Strawberry Hill as his “little gothic castle” and, following the success of his novel, ‘The Castle of Otranto’, for the second edition he added the subheading “A Gothic Story” to the title – thus the literary genre of the Gothic novel began.