Smoking Chimneys

It has taken three months to get into Lutyens’ life but it has been worth the effort.

An interesting childhood with eccentric parents and not much money around, at least by lower, upper class Victorian standards. His father was an artist and a friend of Edwin Landseer. Ned was his tenth child so, running out of ideas, called him Edwin. His pious mother was a Gallwey from Killarney and had three more children; a baker’s dozen.

After studying architecture he bicycled around Surrey getting small commissions, promoted by two older women: Barbara Webb and Gertrude Jekyll. By 1900 he was building country houses referencing the Surrey vernacular, not unlike Voysey’s work. I have stayed at Goddards near Dorking, now cared for by The Landmark Trust.

“The commission was an unusual one. In the words of Lawrence Weaver, writing on Lutyens’ houses in 1913, it was built ‘as a Home of Rest to which ladies of small means might repair for holiday’. This was the idea of Frederick Mirrielees, a wealthy businessman who had married an heiress of the Union Castle shipping line. A central range with common rooms on both floors divided two cottages, the southern of which also contained a bowling alley. Here Lutyens played a game of skittles in 1901 with the three nurses and two old governesses then staying here. They all loved the house and ‘invariably weep when they leave it’.” (Landmark Trust)

I played skittles there too. The small windows beneath overhanging eaves make the rooms dark and while it looks good from the outside, the layout of the interior is impractical by today’s standards. Indeed even at the dawn of the 20th century Lutyens’ clients found their new houses cold and draughty with chimneys that smoked.

Frankly, at this point, he seems an unlikely candidate to build Delhi. But he was ambitious and industrious wanting to turn his dream designs into reality; something to which many architects aspire. The book is a birthday present from a friend who happens to be an architect and I recognise some of my friend’s traits in Lutyens.

Client: “I don’t want a black marble staircase. I want an oak staircase”.

Lutyens: “What a pity”.

Later, Client: “I told you I didn’t want a black marble staircase”.

Lutyens: “I know, and I said what a pity, didn’t I?

The house is Heathcote, in the suburbs of Leeds; Ned’s first venture into neo-classicism. Jane Ridley says “the typical style of the nouveau riche, and Hemingway (the Client) was undoubtedly that.” Hemingway was a rich wool merchant and stumped up £17,500 for his house. Ned said “he didn’t know how to spend his money until he met me”.

It strikes me this is the embryo of Delhi, perhaps owing a debt to Palladio but less slavish than Quinlan Terry, though nobody asked QT to build Delhi. Did he build Poundbury in Dorset for the Prince of Wales? I have been there and it’s a weird residential suburb of Dorchester. Lutyens, in his early years, would have built it in Dorset vernacular.

But Portmeirion, where I have not been, seems a successful architectural pastiche, as well as the setting for a quirky TV prog in the 1960s (The Prisoner). So all I can say is look at architecture, and the tragedy today is most new-builds aren’t Marmite – they are bland and just about OK, like a slice of soggy toast at breakfast with a sachet of butter and another of marmalade washed down with filthy coffee in the sort of place I hope you never stay.

Correction: this illustration was inserted in error. It should of be of Poundbury but was impossible to correct and the picture editor has been dismissed.