Houghton & Holkham - Four great Norfolk Whig houses

‘Taste, expense, state and parade’: Lord Hervey to the Prince of Wales, 14 July, 1731.

The story of the building of Sir Robert Walpole’s palace in the countryside in the 1720s was the cause of celebration, and some notoriety, due to the extraordinary cost of creating both the house and the collection of Old Master paintings. These were gathered first at 10 Downing Street in London and then shipped to Houghton Hall on Walpole’s retirement. House and collection together provided a powerful statement of taste and prestige for Walpole, England’s first ‘prime’ minister. Some thirty years after his death, his grandson notoriously sold the collection to Catherine the Great for display in her Hermitage in 1779. Today the house is once again filled with magnificent works of art and remains in private ownership.

All four houses are near neighbours. Raynham Hall was renovated in the 1720s by Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend and Sir Robert’s brother-in-law, and Secretary of State for the Northern Department (Foreign Affairs) and is still in the ownership of the Townshend family; Holkham Hall and Park, was developed over some thirty years by Walpole’s Postmaster General, Thomas Coke, later 1 st Earl of Leicester. Together with Houghton these houses feature the key influence of William Kent: as interior designer at Houghton and Raynham; as architect, landscape and interior designer at Holkham.

The comparatively little known Wolterton Hall was built on behalf of Robert Walpole’s brother Horatio, who served as Minister Plenipotentiary to The Hague. Horatio’s architect was Thomas Ripley, who also was responsible for modernising Raynham and completing Houghton.

This is an astonishing group of early eighteenth-century, Whig-dominated powerhouses of taste and parade, a little visited group of great Norfolk neighbouring houses. All four houses present some of the most important intact Neo-Palladian architectural ensembles in Britain and feature original furnishings and collections, while bringing their architectural heritage triumphantly into the 21st century.