In unduly modest remarks at the opening of this immaculate book, Clive Aslet, one of our most distinguished architectural historians, notes that there have been substantial biographies of Sir Edwin Lutyens, and he does not pretend to emulate them. His achievement, however, is considerable. Aslet has spent more than 45 years in intense and enthusiastic study of ‘Ned’ and his works, and has not merely an encyclopedic knowledge of what Lutyens built, but two other invaluable qualities. First, he appreciates the sort of man Lutyens was, the influences upon him, and how he interacted with his family (especially his wife Lady Emily) and his clients. Second, he has a deep understanding of the buildings, and the techniques employed in making them, and an enthusiasm he communicates unequivocally to his readers.
Take this description of a part of Heathcote, a house Lutyens built out of his Home Counties comfort zone for the Yorkshire wool baron John Thomas Hemingway:
Beneath the cornice is rustication, which merges with the Doric pilasters: a visual caprice which Lutyens repeated in later buildings. The vigorous projections and recessions of the façade have the plasticity of sculpture. Lutyens’s assurance is breathtaking.
Lutyens grew up in the Surrey hills – an area with which some of his houses, and the style in which he built them, are closely associated – and Aslet depicts an artist struggling against his instincts to go to parts of the country, and use materials, with which he was unfamiliar.
However, Lutyens then takes on more varied projects. He helps improve a house in the French seaside town of Varengeville; in mid-career he is commissioned to undertake his magnum opus, the Viceroy’s palace and associated buildings in New Delhi; and later he evolves into the nation’s architectural remembrancer-in-chief, designing the Cenotaph in Whitehall and some of the war cemeteries on the Western Front. His other masterpiece in this genre is the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. Aslet says this is not a thing of beauty – lumbering brick and stone arches piled upon other lumbering brick and stone arches – but it does represent the ugliness of war. It is certainly magnificent, set on its eminence in an otherwise flat part of France – something perhaps only appreciated when one has approached from a distance, and walked inside the arches and seen the slabs with the names of the 72,000 missing incised into them.
Aslet does not veer too much into the architect’s personal qualities. He seeks to answer the question posed in his subtitle, presenting the evidence (the book is beautifully illustrated) and leaving us to decide whether Lutyens was our greatest architect. He was certainly original, and created a distinct brand, not least because of its deceptive simplicity. Rather like Vaughan Williams, his near contemporary, he created a new ‘national style’, at a time when the national consciousness was so high as to demand it. But he could also be radical as, again, the Cenotaph showed. Aslet quite rightly muses about how the elaborate mathematical calculations, required if all the vertical lines of the monument were to meet 1,000 feet up, were accomplished by a man with little formal schooling. Lutyens also created the plain Stone of Remembrance for his war cemeteries, which could embrace the spirituality of the dead of all faiths, or none.
Aslet gives us the bare bones of the Lutyenses’ marriage, which produced five children, and makes dark and discreet allusions to the architect’s behaviour in bed, which led to his wife kicking him out of it. Those who wish to know such lurid details in greater depth must look elsewhere. He is also amusing about the architect’s relations with his clients, and especially the ease with which he spent their money. Of Hemingway he says that Lutyens ‘ate him for breakfast’ in convincing him he needed ‘a place of status and comfort to reward a lifetime of toil’. And he was not a perfect engineer. The flat roofs at Castle Drogo soon started to leak, and before long the putty holding the glass in the windows decayed.
It was the nouveaux riches who supplied most of Lutyens’s domestic work, which dried up with the Great War. Luckily his friend Reginald McKenna had him build not just some branches of the Midland Bank (of which he was chairman) but also its palatial headquarters in Poultry in the City of London, which shows what Lutyens could do on an unlimited budget.
The book ends with what might have been: tantalising models of the unbuilt Roman Catholic cathedral in Liverpool, for which the money ran out. It’s not too late to build it: it would create thousands of jobs on Merseyside and make the city a place of pilgrimage in perpetuity. Perhaps one day some enlightened cardinal will make it happen, and Ned’s final triumph will be complete.
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