NIKOLAUS PEVSNER, in his Outline of European Architecture, published in the year before Lutyens's death in 1944, does not mention him 20th century English or rather, British architecture is represented only by Voysey, Mackintosh and Holden. Yet Pevsner knew perfectly well that for many people Lutyens was the greatest English architect since Hawks moor or Soane, if not even Wren. But there was no place for him in the modernist gospel. He was the Elgar of architecture he was thought of as pompous and circumstantial.
In his beginnings, however, Lutyens was none of these things. The tenth child of a middling portrait painter and an Irish mother, he started off in Surrey, the most quintessentially "home" of the Home Counties, where professional people and minor gentry were building or enlarging modest houses in the country, though not "country houses", and prosperous people in industry and banking were doing likewise. Lutyens was adroit in forming connections and he had unlimited charm. His clients were not, for the most part, very interesting as people nor, by the standards of the time, very rich. But they had servants and they had leisure, and they wrote letters to each other, and diaries and reminiscences. That, rather than the architecture as such, is what this book is mostly about.
He was taken up by older ladies Gertrude Jekyll, the garden designer 26 years his senior, and, Emily Lawless the poet, of similar age, in self imposed exile from Co Kildare. He married the daughter of the Earl of Lytton at the age of 32. They were ill suited, but they had five children. For most of the middle part of their marriage she was off on a theosophical tack in, among other places, India, of which her father had been viceroy. Her family had initially opposed the match, but soon came round, and the connection did him no harm at all.
In the early years of the century things went merrily enough, with Lutyens bicycling in all directions, cracking jokes over countless dinner tables, and the houses gradually getting bigger and bigger. Most of his few Irish associations date from this period the very successful job at Lambay for the Barings (who, by the way, had a crash in 1890 as spectacular as the one they had last year), Heywood in Leix for Hutchcson Poe" (gardens only), and of course the notorious abortive Dublin gallery scheme for Hugh Lane, who is given a whole chapter all to himself.
But, to borrow Cyril Connolly's plangent phrase, it was already closing time in the gardens of the West. The first World War lopped off most of the sons of the client families and that, even more than death duties or the "servant problem", took the heart out of the country house business. A few large country house's still got built Castle Drogo, Gledstone Hall, Middleton Park for chain store owners, industrialists or peers who had married rich Americans. But increasingly, during his final phase, as he shed the folksy arts and craftsy trappings of his youth for the rigorous mathematical refinements of classical monumentallity the "high game", as he called it his clients were corporate banks, insurance companies, the state and, in the end even the church. Corporate grief found expression in the miraculously simple Whitehall Cenotaph and the stupendous monument at Thiepyal corporate triumph in the Viceroy's House at Delhi no sooner finished than vacated and the tremendous Catholic cathedral of Liverpool, of which only the undercroft was built, but which alone would make that city worth a visit.
But the focus of this book is on people rather than on architecture in the strict sense. There are a great many illustrations, twenty six of them in colour, and the people outnumber the buildings as, in real life, they always do.