The remaking of Gainsborough’s House

From the road Gainsborough’s House looks like it could be a thoroughly plausible restaurant in a town like Godalming or Chertsey, the sort of place where a prawn cocktail costs £15 and comes with most of a lemon in a white gauze satchel on a separate plate. The stout two-storey structure is Georgian, red brick and has a front door flanked by a pair of handsome Regency windows. Glance up the neighbouring side street, however, and you immediately see that something extraordinary has happened: there’s an enormous, ultra-modern, industrial-looking extension to the rear in brick and flint. Is it a carbuncle? I’ll leave you to decide, but yes, I’m confident it’s the sort of thing that would make King Charles choke on his fountain pen.

What’s inside is all that matters here, though. For thanks to a £10 million transformation (around half of which was coughed up by the general public through the National Lottery), Gainsborough’s House, the building in Sudbury in Suffolk where Thomas Gainsborough was born in 1727, has been renovated and trebled in size.