If the Georgian had to be revived in the way of the Greek and the Gothic, it could hardly have been done with more competence and more animation; certainly the Americans of Lutyens’s generation rarely excelled so notably in this particular field, although many of the once highly esteemed firms mentioned earlier positively specialized in it. Beside these houses of Lutyens, the Neo-Georgian of the Shepley firm’s Harvard Houses or Cram’s Sweet Briar College is merely routine. Yet in such work Lutyens was still only a country-house architect.
Before discussing Lutyens’s work at the Hampstead Garden Suburb, with which his association began in 1908, something should be said concerning the ‘Garden City’ movement[[528]] in general. In 1892 Ebenezer Howard[[529]] (1850-1928) published Tomorrow. A Peaceful Path to Reform, better known by the title of the edition of 1902 as Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Howard’s opportunity to realize his aspirations for a new sort of town began with the acquisition of land at Letchworth in 1903, but the construction of the Letchworth Garden City on the plans of Sir Raymond Unwin (1863-1940) and his partner Richard Barry Parker actually post-dates their work at the Hampstead Garden Suburb. They had, however, already laid out a ‘model village’ for a chocolate manufacturer at New Earswick near York in 1904.
In 1907 Dame Henrietta Barnett set out to realize some aspects of the Garden City ideal on the outskirts of London. The next year land was acquired near Golders Green on the far side of Hampstead Heath and the suburb planned as a whole by Parker & Unwin.[[530]] Lutyens was invited to plan and design the group of public buildings in the centre and their immediate setting (Figure [54]). This town centre was eventually largely completed, most of it from Lutyens’s design, and the two churches, with the contiguous squares, provide some of his finest work. His work here certainly set a pace of coherence and urbanity that was unfortunately not maintained in later Garden Cities such as Welwyn, begun in 1919, that followed the rather more diffuse plan of Letchworth.
Welwyn, however, is of importance in the history of town-planning because it was not merely a residential development but included from the first an industrial estate as well. Thus it was a more complete entity and the prototype of the English ‘New Towns’ initiated after the Second World War. The Barnett project was originally, and has remained, an upper-middle-class suburb; yet it is unique for the orderliness and the distinction of the public buildings that Lutyens provided at the centre and the terrace-framed squares that flank them.
St Jude’s, the Anglican church, begun in 1910 and not finally completed at the west end until 1933, is Lutyens’s principal ecclesiastical work, his Catholic cathedral in Liverpool having been barely begun before his death. Lacking the emotional drama of the Scandinavian churches of its period, St Jude’s has nevertheless a certain real boldness of silhouette, produced by rather eclectic means, and an elegance of craftsmanship in the brickwork that is in the finest tradition of the Gothic Revival. Yet, being by Lutyens, it is hardly at all medieval. The tall crossing tower may have slight suggestions of the Norman in its detailing and a cathedral-like scale, but in general the exterior is in a vaguely seventeenth-century vernacular descending from the later work of Shaw and Webb.
Figure 54. Sir Edwin Lutyens: Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, North and South Squares, 1908
The interior, rather surprisingly, proves to be almost High Renaissance in character; there is even a barrel vault over the nave. On the other hand, the timberwork of the roofs of the aisles, which descend so low on either side, is of a structural peculiarity recalling Webb at his crankiest if not, indeed, Butterfield. Except for the highly exceptional London church of the Holy Redeemer, Clerkenwell, built by J. D. Sedding (1837-91) in 1887-8, so truly Palladian—rather than Anglo-Palladian—internally as almost to persuade one that it is Italian, no non-Gothic church of this quality had been built in England for two generations. Lutyens’s more modest Free Church is rather similar, both inside and out, but considerably less effective.
To surround two sides of both North Square and South Square beside the churches Lutyens revived the Early Georgian terrace, varying the composition ingeniously and handling the beautifully laid bricks in two colours, reddish and greyish, with a fascinating subtlety. Unfortunately such truly urban housing stood no chance with the clientèle drawn to this and other Garden Cities as against the appeal of free-standing or semi-detached houses. No general revival of the terrace occurred. But Parker & Unwin and their emulators achieved in individual houses a standard of semi-traditional suavity that represents one of the principal English achievements of the period, and something frequently imitated abroad.
Lutyens’s call to lay out New Delhi as the capital of India followed in 1911, and the first plans were made before 1914. It was a commission better suited to his leaping imagination than the modest domesticity of an English Garden City. Construction of the buildings, notably the enormous Viceroy’s House, began only in 1920.[[531]] Not since L’Enfant laid out Washington had a fiat city of such amplitude and grandeur been conceived, much less even partly executed. The Viceroy’s House, finally finished in 1931, is official residence, centre of administration, and focus of the whole scheme—a tour de force for which, from the Queen Anne, the Neo-Georgian, and the Palladian, Lutyens lifted his sights to a Roman scale (Plate [181]). The result is grand and broad, adapted to the climate, and even reminiscent of the Indian architectural past in some of its forms and features. Towards the designing of such a major monument generations of Frenchmen and others who studied at the Beaux-Arts had been prepared; there is a certain irony that this opportunity came to an Englishman, trained in the most private and individualistic English way.