Horace Walpole began transforming his modest Twickenham villa into Strawberry Hill, a fantastical pseudo-Gothic castle, in 1749, completing it over nearly three decades. With its turrets, battlements, stained glass, and pointed arches assembled from architectural sources ranging from Westminster Abbey to Rouen Cathedral, Strawberry Hill invented a playful antiquarian Gothicism that transformed British taste. From its private press, Walpole printed significant literary and historical works, and the house directly inspired his novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), the founding text of Gothic fiction.

Strawberry Hill stands at the direct origin of the Gothic literary tradition that produced the great castle-haunted novels and poems of the Romantic era. Walpole's The Castle of Otranto established the template of the haunted aristocratic fortress as a site of terror, inheritance, and guilt. The Gothic castle as literary space — dark corridors, secret passages, ancestral curses — passed through Ann Radcliffe into Byron's Childe Harold, Keats's 'The Eve of St Agnes', and Tennyson's 'Mariana', shaping a century of poetry.