Holly James Johnston at Strawberry Hill House

Holly James Johnston (2019, DPhil English) has featured in two radio BBC Radio broadcasts.

The programme Sunday Feature: Queer Gothic on Radio 3, presented by Sarah Waters, explores the queer roots of gothic literature and architecture on location at Horace Walpole’s home in Twickenham, Strawberry Hill House.

During the programme, listeners hear sections of Holly’s LGBTQ+ visitor tour of Walpole’s eighteenth-century home, which he referred to as his “little Gothic castle”. Walpole was a writer and collector, and the author of The Castle of Otranto, the first gothic novel.

Strawberry Hill House (Photo credit: Tony Hisgett)

As part of the tour, Holly takes visitors through the building, bringing attention to the location and architecture of the property. She explains how the property was developed by Walpole over a 30-year period and introduce Walpole’s “Committee of Taste”, which was comprised of himself, Richard Bentley and John Chute. The programme describes the various areas of the house and their unique design, which sparked a tradition of queer Gothic style. Visitors also move through Horace’s bedchamber, where he had the dream that inspired The Castle of Otranto, an outlandish tale of ghosts and supernatural occurrences.

The Long Gallery in Strawberry Hill House (photo credit: Gary Ullah)

Speaking about Walpole’s design choices, Holly said: “By channelling sexuality and queer desire and mediating it through art and architecture, you create a veil around it. It becomes a coded language through which queer men could freely talk to one another but if you didn’t have those same affinities and sensibilities, you weren’t privy to it.”

Holly has also written a piece for RIBAs Revisiting the Collections blog titled The queer aesthetics of Strawberry Hill House.

Holly also features in Three Transformations of Virginia Woolf: Gender, the third of three episodes within the BBC Radio 4 Artworks series. During the episode, Fiona Shaw explores the writer’s defiance of gender norms. Having been introduced to Woolf’s Orlando by an English teacher as a teenager, Holly named her drag king persona after the character.

Orlando by Henri T Art

She said: “I really wanted to carry the spirit of Orlando, that irreverence and playfulness, into my own drag practice. I think what’s appealing about drag is you can embody characters and modes of either masculinity or femininity that you wouldn’t otherwise have access to in your everyday life.”

Holly also shares her interpretation of the moment of Orlando’s change of sex within the novel. She said: “The novel’s most queer act, this change of sex, is represented in a way that might surprise us as readers. There is no fixation on the body or genitals and, in fact, Orlando’s own reaction guides our reaction as readers. So, she wakes up, she looks at herself in the mirror, and she goes to her bath.”

Holly James Johnston is a writer, presenter, and performer. She has presented short films for Tate, The National Gallery, the V&A, and The National Trust, led a course at the V&A titled “The Queer History of Art” and created the queer history podcast “Into That World Inverted” alongside Dr Diarmuid Hester. Holly completed her undergraduate degree at University College London, before coming to Univ in 2019 for her Master’s and DPhil in English.

Published: 18 February 2026

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