LUTYENS – ARCHITECT OF EMPIRE

The name of Edwin Lutyens has often appeared in this column – rightly so, as he was one of the most famous British architects of the 20th century, and one of the most famous in the world. If you’d stopped anyone in the street in, say, 1935, and asked then to name an architect, it was almost inevitable that they would say ‘Lutyens’; the only other one they would probably name was Sir Christopher Wren.

You may even own a piece of furniture designed by Lutyens; the Lutyens’ garden bench, with its curved back, is to be seen in many country house gardens, and is for sale in the posher garden centres. Four years ago, it came out of copyright – though people had been copying it for many years.

Edwin Lutyens was born on 29 March 1869 (we should be getting ready to celebrate his 150th birthday next year!) in Onslow Square in London, the ninth son of a painter who was friendly with the artist Sir Edwin Landseer – hence his name, Edwin Landseer Lutyens.

The family also had a home in the Surrey village of Thursley, where Edwin was mostly brought up. As a young child, he had rheumatic fever and was considered ‘delicate’; he was educated at home by his sisters’ governess. He spent many hours wandering the Surrey lanes and haunting the local building sites and builders’ yards, where he learned about architecture and the practicalities of building.

By the time he was 15, it was obvious that architecture was his passion and his future; he spent two years at the somewhat austere National Art Training School, but he wanted practical architectural experience. He received it as a paying apprentice in the office of Ernest George, a leading country house architect. Lutyens stayed only a year with George, but while there he made friends with another pupil, Herbert Baker.

Then, aged just 19, Lutyens set up his own architectural practice in London. He’d received two commissions; both were for neighbours of his parent’s Surrey home. Two years later he met Gertrude Jekyll, 23 years his senior. She was one of seven children; a younger brother was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, who appropriated the family name for his horror novella ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’.

Miss Jekyll was a painter and interior designer – but, most famously, was a practical gardener. She recognised in the young architect someone with a natural talent for design, and with a delight in traditional materials and techniques that made him her ideal partner. They collaborated until her death in 1932 at the age of 89; he knew her affectionately as ‘Aunt Bump’.

Together they worked on many country houses, at first in Lutyens’ Arts-and -Crafts-influenced vernacular style. Many of the clients were introduced to Lutyens by Aunt Bump, but he was very good at making them into friends. He called them his ‘patrons’ rather than his clients, and could often persuade them into lavish spending – as, for example, at Lindisfarne Castle, which he converted into a comfortable northern retreat for Edward Hudson, owner of ‘Country Life’ magazine.

In 1897 Lutyens married Lady Emily Bulwer Lytton. Although he loved Emily, it wasn’t a happy marriage; after the eleven years in which their five children were born, Emily withdrew into herself and into Theosophy.

By 1906 Lutyens’ style had changed from the cosy vernacular to the grander classical. Heathcote in Ilkley marked this change, which was to remain the basis of the Lutyens style until his death in 1944. The Heathcote garden was, of course, designed by Jekyll. But the greatest fruit of Lutyens’ classicism was in India.

At the Indian Durbar of 1911 George V announced that the capital of India was to move from Calcutta to Delhi. In 1912 Lutyens was appointed a member the royal commission was set up to advise the government of India on the site of the new centre of government. He designed the layout of the new imperial city, and its most important building, the Viceroy’s House.

His friend Herbert Baker designed the Secretariat buildings in front; changes made by the government resulted in the Secretariat obscuring the Viceroy’s house, and Lutyens and Baker fell out about it; Lutyens later described the battle over New Delhi as his ‘Bakerloo’. Nevertheless, it was for his work in New Delhi that Lutyens was knighted, in 1918.

In 1920 he deigned the Cenotaph in Whitehall, perhaps his most recognised structure. He later served as President of the Royal Academy and was made a member of the Order of Merit. But on his death in 1944 Lutyens was a disappointed man; he had failed to see his largest and most prestigious building completed.

In the early 1930s he had designed a new Roman Catholic Cathedral for Liverpool; it would have been the second-largest church in the world, with the world’s largest dome. The estimated cost was £3 million. The foundation stone was laid on 5 June 1933 and work progressed steadily on the crypt until 1941, when wartime restrictions on materials and a rise in costs to an estimated £27 million forced a stop. It was left like that when Lutyens died. Work began again in 1956; the crypt was completed two years later. Then it was abandoned. The current Metropolitan cathedral, designed by Frederick Gibberd in 1960, sits on top of Lutyens’ crypt.

A contemporary summed up Lutyens after his death as ‘a magician and a spell-binder, a man of wit and great playfulness – but also a great architect.’ Pevsner, who, as a supporter of modernism, was not sympathetic, said Lutyens ‘shared to the full the imperial folie de grandeur of the Edwardian years’. Today Lutyens is rightly regarded as one of Britain’s great architects – something you might wish to contemplate as you sit on your Lutyens bench.

Copyright © 2020 Ripon Civic Society. Hosting sponsored by HostPresto.