Webinars and Lectures Raise Awareness of Edwin Lutyens in Tandem

By Robin Prater and Robbie Kerr

The Lutyens Trust America’s webinars and The Lutyens Trust’s lecture series continue to celebrate Edwin Lutyens’s work and milieu in parallel. Since the report on the webinars in the Summer 2021 Lutyens Trust Newsletter, four new webinars have been produced. The webinars are now being produced once every two months. Announcements of upcoming ones can be found on The Lutyens Trust America website (www.lutyenstrustamerica.com) and on The Lutyens Trust website (www.lutyenstrust.org.uk) as well as on the two Trusts’ Instagram, Facebook and Twitter pages.

As The Lutyens Trust America nears producing its 20th webinar, it would like to thank its panelists who have been so generous with their time. It has been an honour – and a treat – to work with such talented individuals who share an appreciation of Edwin Lutyens’s gift for design. A thank you goes to Marcos Lutyens who has been the stalwart of its production efforts and to all those who’ve watched and supported the webinars to date.

Most recent webinars, along with the names of their panelists:

  • “Homage to The Salutation: A Hidden Masterpiece” (Stuart Martin, Robin Prater)
  • “Lutyens and the Hampstead Garden Suburb” (Timothy Brittain-Catlin, Duncan Stroik)
  • “Restrained Harmony: Edwin Lutyens’s Creation at Nashdom” (Katy Simmons, Jun Huang)
  • “Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme” (Jon Gedling, Director of Works at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and Martin Lutyens)

The online lectures, meanwhile, have been continuing apace with good numbers attending, providing invaluable support for The Lutyens Trust. The first, recently concluded series, called “Lutyens and the Edwardians”, saw a number of brilliant speakers explore the wider context in which Lutyens was working with reference to the worlds of art, landscape, film, architecture and society.

Following this, Clive Aslet spoke eloquently in his lecture, “A Kind of Private Princedom: The Story of the Country House”, based on his book, The Story of the Country House. This provided a wonderful dance through the ages and wove together politics, economics, technology and changes in society to paint an extraordinary picture. More information on this subject can be found in his book, available via his website (www.cliveaslet.com).

The second, current lecture series is entitled “Memorial Design Through the Ages”. Stefan Goebel gave this a brilliant introduction with his lecture, “From Remembrance to Forgetting”. Roger Bowdler then put memorials eloquently in the context of Lutyens’s designs, looking at works of his and his contemporaries and building on the research he has done into many more low-key memorials. John Stewart and Michael Baker provided an emotionally charged, intriguing insight into Sir Herbert Baker’s work on memorials before Mark Connelly spoke about those of Sargeant Jagger.

Tim Godden introduced the work of the junior architects of the Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission), while Tim Skelton provided an extraordinary insight into the private memorials and tombs that make up nearly half of the designs that Lutyens carried out in a lecture entitled “In Memoriam – The Graves and Memorials of Sir Edwin Lutyens”. Lucy Noakes gave a lecture on “The Emotion of the Commemorations of World War II” and Graham Oliver on “Cultures of Commemoration: War Memorials Ancient and Modern”.

This series helps provide a wider context to this rather special and specialist area of design, and ties in with The Lutyens Trust America’s webinar, “Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme”, with speakers Jon Gedling, Director of Works at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and Martin Lutyens.

All lectures start at 6pm (GMT) and normally finish by 7pm (GMT).

Lectures in the second series held to date:

  • “From Remembrance to Forgetting” (Stefan Goebel)
  • “Lutyens Memorials in the Edwardian Context” (Roger Bowdler)
  • “Sir Herbert Baker and the Imperial War Graves Commission” (John Stewart, Michael Baker)
  • “The Memorials of Charles Sargeant Jagger” (Mark Connelly)
  • “Junior Architects of the Imperial War Graves Commission” (Tim Godden)
  • “In Memoriam – The Graves and Memorials of Sir Edwin Lutyens” (Tim Skelton)
  • “The Emotion of the Commemorations of World War II” (Lucy Noakes)
  • “Cultures of Commemoration: War Memorials Ancient and Modern” (Graham Oliver)

The webinars can be found on:
https://lutyenstrustamerica.com/about/webinars/ and https://www.lutyenstrust.org.uk/about-lutyens/webinars/ and the Lutyens Trust America YouTube channel

The lectures can be seen at:
https://www.lutyenstrust.org.uk/about-lutyens/lectures/