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Buildings where the building is the reason to go: the inside-out, the Art Deco, the concrete, and the ones that make no sense at all until somebody explains them.
Horace Walpole's white gothic villa, the house that started the whole gothic revival.
HousesGeorgianYou can go inside
Also in Museums and Literary London.
Walpole bought a coachman's cottage at Twickenham in 1747 and spent the next thirty years turning it into a castle, working with a committee of friends rather than an architect and taking details wholesale from medieval tombs and cathedral screens - a chimneypiece from a tomb in Canterbury, a ceiling from Henry VII's chapel. It is all plaster, papier-mache and paint pretending to be stone, and that is the joke and the point. The Gallery is the room people come for: fan vaulting in papier-mache, gilded, under crimson damask. He wrote The Castle of Otranto here after a nightmare, and invented the gothic novel in the house he had invented gothic revival in.
| Monday | 11:00 – 16:00 |
|---|---|
| Tuesday | 11:00 – 16:00 |
| Wednesday | 11:00 – 16:00 |
| Thursday | Closed |
| Friday | Closed |
| Saturday | Closed |
| Sunday | 11:00 – 16:00 |
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.