Welcoming Clive Aslet as New Chairman of the Lutyens Trust

By Dominic Lutyens

Coincidentally, for someone so interested in Edwin Lutyens, Clive Aslet grew up in Lutyens country – Surrey – not that he was aware of the architect then. “I can’t pretend I lived in a Lutyens house,” jokes Clive when we met at his London home to talk about his passion for Lutyens which led, over time, to his election as new Chairman of The Lutyens Trust, taking over from Martin Lutyens. It was a fascinating chat, taking in personal memories and observations about Lutyens’s slowburn rehabilitation after years of being underestimated and overlooked.

Clive first got hooked on architecture when reading History of Art at the University of Cambridge: “It involved a lot of history of architecture and that really got me into it,” he says. He remembers how around this time, in the 1970s, “people were looking for alternatives to the modern movement, which was losing its monolithic identity”.

His enthusiasm for Lutyens, in particular, was fired by the Hayward Gallery exhibition on him of 1981 to 1982, another indication that the tide against modernism was now really turning. “It was very daring of the Hayward to put this on – and very exciting.”

Soon after graduating, Clive became a journalist and his links with Lutyens were cemented when he joined Country Life. Disappointingly, he just lost out on working in its original office, designed by Lutyens for its founder Edward Hudson, since the magazine’s publisher, IPC Magazines, had moved its HQ to the Brutalist skyscraper, King’s Reach Tower, in Blackfriars – an unpopular move to many.

Clive vividly retells how Country Life’s staff pined for their old office. He also recalls how during his tenure at the magazine, from 1993 to 2006, which culminated in his becoming Editor, his colleagues only had eyes for Georgian architecture – ironically, given the magazine’s steadfast promotion of Lutyens in past decades.

Clive became even more acquainted with Lutyens’s work on penning his book, The Edwardian Country House: A Social and Architectural History, published in 1980 (and reprinted in 2012). “Writing it really drew me to Lutyens,” he says. “I visited many other buildings he designed or remodelled for Hudson – Deanery Garden, Lindisfarne and Plumpton Place. Lutyens and Hudson, who were both very shy, were enormously good friends.”

Clive wrote a candid piece for Country Life about Deanery Garden in which he decried its billionaire owner’s decision to have the original oak panelling painted white. “All White is not All Right”, fumed the headline. “But there was a happy ending,” recalls Clive: “The owner later put the house on the market and the estate agent took out four pages of advertising in the magazine – as a gatefold.” The white paint was later removed to reveal the original oak.

Clive has written several other books, including The Story of the Country House: A History of Places and People and Old Homes, New Life: The Resurgence of the British Country House with photography by Dylan Thomas. In 2019, Clive and Dylan co-founded their publishing house, Triglyph Books. Moreover, after directing an architectural summer school for the University of Buckingham in 2019, he helped to establish the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture at Downing College, the University of Cambridge, which opened in 2021. He has just been elected visiting professor there.

Clive has also conducted tours of Lutyens houses for American visitors, notably architects, some in collaboration with tour company Classical Excursions. “The architects are really passionate and notice the smallest details. The tours were very rewarding.” It was during one of these that Clive met Martin and got involved in the Trust; prior to becoming Chairman, he was a Trustee.

Clive’s long-standing passion for Lutyens’s work makes him ideal for the role.