Classical bling

I promised you some more photos from last weekend's visit to Norfolk's Houghton Hall, part of this summer's project to visit previously unseen stately homes.

It's extraordinary architecture, part of the brash explosion of Classicism that swept eighteenth century England. It's also a fascinating piece of social history, having been built by Robert Walpole, the first British Prime Minister.

Walpole was a slippery fox of a statesmen who managed to manouevre himself into the senior role in government as First Lord of the Treasury, and then to make it the epicentre of political power. In the process he amassed almost unimaginable wealth, largely from what today we would think of as graft and corruption, which he poured into ostentatious displays: Houghton was the most obvious expression of that.

It was built for entertaining, to reflect Walpole's prestige and wealth, to awe his guests and further consolidate his power. While the state rooms on the piano nobile are overwhelmingly lush, the family rooms are almost wilfully plain and undecorated (despite the lavish spending, Walpole could be a bit of a cheapskate).

To skip ahead for a moment, when Walpole died his successors were saddled with staggering debts and part of the art collection was flogged off to Russia's Catherine the Great: so enormous was it that it formed the nucleus of the Russian royal art collection.

But you shouldn't imagine that Houghton was left denuded: such was the level of accretion that today it appears stuffed to the gills with fine art and treasures. Even the most basic of outdoor benches reeks of quality materials and fine workmanship:

Incidentally, you can buy modern copies of that and other Houghton furniture, all hand made on the estate. Search the web if you're interested and money is no object.

Inside the house there is one of those insanely annoying (and petty) bans on photography, with warders in every single room.

In a deliberate act of passive-aggressive defiance, I stole these two pathetic shots.

For a pale reflection of the scale and pomp of Houghton, check out the industrial architecture of the stables:

This is a stable block, for God's sake...

Even here, Walpole insisted on displays of bling -- the gold leaf Saracen's head on the downpipe is from his coat of arms, as crass as any footballer in marking his territory, but given tasteful respectability by the patina of age:

The House has some of the finest private gardens anywhere, though having come for the architecture the gardens always seem to me to be a second best.

In fact, it was Houghton's fate to be perpetually second-best. Walpole's vast display of nouveau riches wealth was effortlessly trumped just a few years later by the Earls of Leicester whose Classical pile at Holkham, just a handful of miles down the road, is unquestionably the finest palace in Norfolk and, indeed, among the very best in England.

Even Edward VII rejected Houghton when, as Prince of Wales, he was seeking a house in Norfolk -- reputedly he found it far too grand to be a hunting lodge and he settled on dowdy old Sandringham a couple of miles to the west.

But none of that should detract from the saucy bling of Houghton, a showy trollop of a stately home, an extraordinary testimony to Walpole's guile and greed, and to the WAG style of his architects and designers (including William Kent, who was later to be the architectural genius behind Holkham).