STROLLING in Trafalgar Square in the spring of 1926, The Sketch writer Beverley Nichols asked Edwin Lutyens how he would improve his surroundings. Distracted by a news ticker flashing across a building, the architect took a while to reply, but eventually looked at the Landseer lions at the foot of Nelson’s column and whispered: ‘If I had my way, I would put a gramophone in the tummy of each of them and make them purr.’ A fanciful answer from the man who had once been hailed (by German scholar Hermann Muthesius) as likely to become ‘the accepted leader among English builders of houses’. Lutyens, however, always confounded expectations—shy yet sociable; inarticulate yet witty; a genius, but, in the words of COUNTRY LIFE’s Architectural Editor of the time, Christopher Hussey, as ‘blithe and unselfconscious as a boy’.
Perhaps most confounding of all was that Lutyens had managed to see good fortune in his ill health. As a child, he had been plagued with rheumatic fever, so, as he once told writer Osbert Sitwell: ‘[I] had to teach myself, for my enjoyment, to use my eyes instead of my feet. My brothers hadn’t the same advantage.’ He was also free to spend much time in the country, at Thursley in Surrey, where he learned the ropes of traditional building techniques—and met the neighbour that would set young ‘Ned’ on his path.
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