Edwin Lutyens
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 13 September 2011
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If Edwin Lutyens, the architect behind New Delhi, the Cenotaph, and the British embassy in Washington, sounds an austere, imperial figure then think again. He was fun and almost child-like - he loved to dance and doodle, and he told terrible jokes. But his great grand daughter, Jane Ridley, believes it was Lutyens' shockingly miserable marriage that inspired his greatest work. Simon Jenkins, former editor of The Times and current head of the National Trust, chooses Lutyens primarily for the quality of his work. But he also recognises that the grimness of the marriage - Emily Lutyens fell in love with Krishnamurti - spurred the architect onto greater heights. Presenter Matthew Parris initially questions whether the quality of Lutyens' sex life really needs to play a part in this tale, then declares himself underwhelmed by much of the work. Expert Jane Ridley is the author of the Architect and his Wife, and the producer is Miles Warde.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
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| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. Thank you for |
| 0:30.8 | downloading this great lives podcast from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:34.0 | For more information and details of other podcasts just visit BBC. |
| 0:38.0 | co. UK slash radio 4. |
| 0:41.0 | After 26 series and nearly 240 great lives, today we have for the very first time an architect, |
| 0:49.1 | Edwin Lansir Lutchens. |
| 0:51.5 | This unbelievably energetic man had by the age of 35 designed or enlarged some 200 |
| 0:57.8 | country houses. He designed a whole suburb in Hampstead in London. He was also the architect behind the Senatov in Whitehall, the British embassy in |
| 1:06.0 | Washington and perhaps most famously of all the design for large parts of New Delhi, chosen |
| 1:11.7 | to replace Calcutta as the new seat of government in India a century ago. |
| 1:16.7 | But if Lutchen sounds an austere imperial figure, think again. |
| 1:21.5 | Edwin Lutchens was fun and almost childlike. |
| 1:24.2 | He loved to dance, he loved to tease, he loved to joke, |
| 1:27.3 | he doodled all the time, odd little scribbles such as Spike Milligan used to draw. |
| 1:32.3 | My guest, whose chosen Lutchens, is Sir Simon Jenkins, |
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