This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869 — 1944) was once venerated as one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century. Even if you haven’t heard of Lutyens, you have almost certainly encountered one of his designs. Perhaps the Cenotaph on Whitehall or the bonkers Castle Drogo in Devon, St Jude’s Church in Hampstead, the Midland Bank on Poultry (now a five-star hotel), or, even farther afield, the grandiloquent Viceroy’s House in New Delhi. 

But over the past few decades, he has regrettably fallen out of fashion, with his reputational reach limited to a small coterie of Lutyens lovers. This is an appalling oversight. Clive Aslet’s reverential biography attempts to redress this evanescence. He is correct that it’s not just young architects and architectural historians who are “missing out” on this “master of form and poet of materials”, but also the general public.

Readers may be surprised to find that a mammoth painting covers the entirety of the endpapers. It is a capriccio (an architectural fantasy) by the artist Carl Laubin of all Lutyens’ built and unbuilt works, shown at the same scale so that one can compare their sizes. 

From his Brobdingnagian vision for Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral to the doll’s house Lutyens designed for Queen Mary — still the largest in the world — the picture is a fascinating visualisation of one man’s endless creativity. “No other architect has been so various,” Aslet argues. The sheer scale and diversity of Lutyens’ output is mind-blowing. 

Lutyens’ prodigious career was kickstarted, aged just 19, by commissions for quirky country piles across the home counties. Stylistically, these were cheerful combos of the Arts and Crafts and Edwardian freestyle movements, the latter essentially being an “anything goes” approach to architecture. 

Lutyens’ personal signature, as Aslet terms it, is an unusual delight. His entrances offered quirk rather than neoclassical grandiosity. They were designed to follow nonsensical, circuitous routes which took guests on a journey of discovery. A very English sense of eccentricity permeates all of his domestic creations, capturing that most winsome of human qualities: curiosity. 

His “child-like imagination” is best observed in the tiny “crawling” window he built at Great Dixter in East Sussex which allowed the children of the house to spy on the adults below during parties. We can only bemoan the absence of play in our own age.

Aslet’s subtitle asks whether Lutyens is “Britain’s greatest architect?”. The question mark is both endearing and slightly self-deprecating; one gets the sense that Aslet wants his readers to make up their own minds about Lutyens’ architectural oeuvre. The question is a bold one. In much the same way as Shakespeare is Britain’s national writer, surely it places undue pressure on anyone to be Britain’s national builder. 

And if not Lutyens, then who? Throughout his entire life Lutyens both idolised and envied Christopher Wren, jokingly searching for his own “Wrenaissance”. In truth, Wren remains better recognised; St Paul’s often tops lists of the “most iconic” British buildings. 

But each age leaves its defining architectural mark on our landscapes and skylines. Inigo Jones, John Nash, William Kent, Charles Barry, George Gilbert Scott and Ernő Goldfinger have all influenced this country’s architectural soul. So what makes Lutyens so special?

The answer, Aslet suggests, lies not just in Lutyens’ personal genius, but also in the momentous epoch in which he lived. New technologies impacted domestic architecture on a small but not insignificant scale. Large garages for a new motor car-loving elite were in demand; the newly-developed Hoover made the Edwardian rug-beater redundant, anticipating a reduction in the size of servants’ quarters. 

Through the potted histories of Lutyens’ clients we get a sense of “the tempests that shook the Edwardian age”. In response to these upheavals, Lutyens devised designs that were uniquely modern whilst also preserving the “lyricism” of the country’s ancient vistas. 

But Aslet claims that Britain’s architectural scope had never been located solely in the picturesque countryside. In 1911, the British Raj decided to move its capital from Calcutta to Delhi, India’s historic seat of power, igniting work for an entire new city. Lutyens and his friend Herbert Baker were responsible for its design and execution. 

It was a task of epic proportions, requiring hundreds of thousands of workers. New Delhi was ostensibly an “architecture of power”, which demanded the yoking of Eastern aesthetics to Western Classicism. The entire chronology of Lutyens’ past creations led up up to this over-ambitious scheme. 

Regrettably, Aslet hedges his bets with the following platitude: “People’s responses to it often depend on their view of the British Empire.” We may not mourn empire but we can mourn its excesses and grandiosity. If anything, Aslet is correct to suggest that the death of the Empire meant building on such a scale would simply never be achieved again.

Empire had its reckoning in the fields and trenches of Flanders and the Somme. So it is only fitting that the man who was the architect of empire also became its commemorator, designing 127 cemeteries in France at the behest of the Imperial War Graves Commission. He concluded that “only geometry could express the weight of meaning that such [monuments] would have to bear”. 

When some idiot yob drapes themselves over the Cenotaph, unveiled in London in 1920, they are inadvertently reminding us of Lutyens. His memorials, including the “Stone of Remembrance”, now found throughout European battlefields, were determinedly secular, which proved hugely popular with the public at the time. Lutyens had turned national “anguish” and “rage” into an appropriately solemn and wholly accessible visual language that both comforted and challenged. After the War, the entire world had changed. It’s no wonder that Lutyens’ style had adapted from “lyrical” in his early years to “elemental” post-1914.

Aslet, by his own admission, is not attempting a comprehensive overview of Lutyens’ life and work but rather offering an appreciation of his talents through a selection of his best buildings. His book laudably doesn’t skimp on accompanying photographs and blueprints. As such, it may serve as the definitive introduction to Lutyens for those unfamiliar with his work, whilst refusing to talk down to those who are much better acquainted with his greatness.

After finishing Sir Edwin Lutyens: Britain’s Greatest Architect? many readers, I would suggest, will mentally remove the question mark. This may not necessarily be on account of Lutyens’ versatility and prolificacy: for him to straddle one of the most volatile periods in British history, whilst continuously reinventing an architectural language to meet one era’s needs and yet never relinquishing his own individual vision, is quite the feat. 

So if the jury is still out on whether Lutyens is “Britain’s Greatest Architect”, one can at least hope that this wholly necessary book will mean fewer people will be blind to what he has to offer.