In England, in the second half of the 18th century, the term Gothic was freed of the negative connotations that had been attached to it by Renaissance art critics. This was a result of the early romantic infatuation with the Middle Ages, which saw medieval art as an expression of the national spirit; it was also a reaction to the Palladian officialism of lnigo Jones and the baroque classicism of Wren. Although it can be identified in other countries of Europe and also in the United States, this Gothic revival, as it came to be called, was strongest in England, where it was also associated with religious and national significance.

At the same time, the classical idea of beauty as harmony and balance was renounced by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), which laid the basis for an aesthetics of sentiment that distinguishes the beautiful from the sublime, the latter understood as the response to whatever is terrible and emotionally disturbing. This concept, together with that of the ‘picturesque’, drew attention to whatever was different, dangerous, surprising, even decadent; the ideal of symmetry was abandoned in favour of asymmetry and irregularity. Ruins became a popular subject because of the emotions they inspire.

In this context, the asymmetrical layout of Strawberry Hill set in motion the so-called castellated Gothic, in which the country house is turned into a medieval castle placed in the midst of nature, if possible atop a rocky crag. Thanks to its association with the picturesque and the sublime, this strongly visionary style soon reached great popularity.

During the years 1810-20 the eccentric Gothic reveries, having reached a kind of culmination in the romantic concept of Fonthill Abbey, gave way to the demand for the accurate imitation of medieval forms combined with a return to medieval craftsmanship. The Gothic revival thus left the sphere of the country house and took its place as a style in competition with neoclassicism, and since Gothic was considered a Christian style by definition, it immediately conquered the sphere of church building, attaching itself directly to the late Perpendicular Gothic, considered a completely autonomous and original English creation.