Hertford

Red, orange, Strawberry

I pass by lots of Georgian houses and often give them an admiring glance – their proportions, Classical details, and brickwork are usually very satisfying. Cecil House in Hertford, a building of the 1770s, would probably have provoked a similar standard reaction: I like very much the red brick walls (Flemish bond) and the orange brick window surrounds, standing out from the crowd, but not too much.

But one feature stands out slightly more. It’s the porch, in the delicate 18th-century Gothic style (often called Gothick) that had become popular since Horace Walpole had begun to rebuild his house, Strawberry Hill at Twickenham, in the middle of the century. Slender clustered columns with little octagonal bases and minimal capitals support an upper area featuring a row of quatrefoils above repeated cusped blind arches. There’s a Gothic fanlight above the door and Gothic panelling in the reveals on either side of the door too.

None of this is anything like medieval Gothic, but it uses medieval Gothic motifs – quatrefoils, arches, little annulet rings around the columns, and so on – in a charming way. These motifs are combined in such a manner that they also recall classicism – those quatrefoil-decorated areas above the columns are a bit like a classical entablature, so that we are close to a sort of made-up ‘Gothic order’, something advocated by the 18th-century writer Batty Langley and a phenomenon I’ve noticed on other buildings of this period. The elements are rather plonked together in places, but that's part of their charm – as is the porch’s pointed, tent-like roof, which adds the finishing touch.

If the brickwork of this house seems to suggest tradition, solidity, and propriety, the porch is almost the opposite: improper, whimsical, and slightly flimsy. In many ways these two aspects of the building seem oddly matched, yet they are also true, in their different fashions, to their time.