--- title: "Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944)" date: "2026-11-04T09:56:12+00:00" modified: "2026-11-04T09:56:14+00:00" url: "https://heritage.humanists.uk/edwin-lutyens/" post_id: 14804 categories: ["Arts", "Ceremonies", "Freedom of Belief", "Peace & Pacifism"] tags: ["Architecture", "First World War", "Humanism", "Rationalism"] --- # Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944) > It stands out as vast as humanity, with no barnacles of piety clinging to it. > > *The Literary Guide* on the Cenotaph, December 1920 Sir Edwin Lutyens was the leading British architect of his generation, the designer of country houses, of the government quarter of New Delhi, and of many of the memorials to the dead of the First World War. His best-known work, the Cenotaph in Whitehall, became the focus of the nation’s remembrance. Lutyens insisted that the memorials he designed should honour everyone who had died, whatever their beliefs. The Cenotaph carries no cross and no religious text, and the *Literary Guide* greeted it as ‘the most notable triumph of humanism in the official mind’. More than a century later it is where humanists, alongside people of every faith, lay their wreaths each Remembrance Sunday. ### Life Edwin Landseer Lutyens was born on 29 March 1869 in Kensington, London, the tenth of 13 children of Charles Lutyens, a soldier and painter, and his Irish wife Mary Gallwey. He was named after his father’s friend, the painter Sir Edwin Landseer. The family moved to Thursley in Surrey, and because of poor health in childhood he had little formal schooling, learning instead from the buildings and craftsmen of the Surrey villages. He studied at the South Kensington School of Art from 1885 to 1887, worked briefly for the architects Ernest George and Harold Peto, and set up his own practice in 1889. ![](https://heritage.humanists.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/11/Sir-Edwin-Lutyens.jpg)[Sir Edwin Lutyens](https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw93598/Sir-Edwin-Lutyens?_gl=1*rpfy1c*_up*MQ..*_ga*MTg3MjE1MzQ3OS4xNzkzNzgzMzE2*_ga_3D53N72CHJ*czE3OTM3ODMzMTUkbzEkZzEkdDE3OTM3ODMzNDgkajI3JGwwJGgw) by Walter Stoneman, 1924 NPG x31551 © National Portrait Gallery, London ### Through his friendship with the garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, for whom he built Munstead Wood in Surrey, Lutyens made his name designing country houses in the Arts and Crafts style, followed by grander classical buildings. In 1897 he married Lady Emily Lytton, daughter of a former Viceroy of India; she later became a devoted Theosophist and follower of Jiddu Krishnamurti, an enthusiasm her husband did not share. From 1912 he worked, with Herbert Baker, on the plan for New Delhi, the new capital of British India, including the Viceroy’s House, and he was knighted in 1918. In 1917 Lutyens became one of the three principal architects of the Imperial War Graves Commission, charged with designing cemeteries for the hundreds of thousands of men killed on the Western Front. Rather than a cross, he proposed a single great block of stone, without religious symbols, for the dead of all faiths and none, inscribed with ‘one thought in clear letters so that all men for all time may read and know’. This became the Stone of Remembrance, inscribed ‘Their name liveth for evermore’. Some churchmen thought the design too secular, and even pagan, and the Commission added a Cross of Sacrifice designed by Reginald Blomfield. Both now stand in Commonwealth war cemeteries around the world, while the headstones, uniform for every rank, carry a religious symbol only if a soldier’s family wished it. In July 1919 the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, asked Lutyens to design a temporary monument for the Victory Parade in London. He was asked for something non-denominational, and he produced the design for a ‘cenotaph’, an empty tomb, almost at once. Built in wood and plaster, it was unveiled on 18 July 1919, bearing only the words ‘The Glorious Dead’. The public response was overwhelming, and the Government agreed to rebuild it in stone. Lutyens waived his fee and refined the design, giving its sides and steps almost invisible curves, worked out over many pages of calculations, which he said gave it ‘a sculpturesque quality and a life’. Not everyone was pleased. Some Christians complained that the monument bore no Christian symbol, the *Catholic Herald* denounced it as pagan, and in Parliament Lord Wolmer asked when ‘this article called the cenotaph’ would be removed. The Leader of the House, Andrew Bonar Law, replied that it commemorated the men who, ‘irrespective of their religious creeds’, had made the supreme sacrifice. The *Literary Guide*, the journal of the [Rationalist Press Association](https://heritage.humanists.uk/rationalist-press-association/), followed the controversy closely and urged rationalists to defend the monument for the sake of ‘the other heroes who died without the aid or the stimulus of the Cross’. ![](https://heritage.humanists.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/11/The_Cenotaph_at_Whitehall_1920_Q31491-1024x620.jpg)[The unveiling of the permanent Cenotaph at Whitehall](http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205076819), by King George V, 11 November 1920. Imperial War Museum Photograph Archive Collection ![](https://heritage.humanists.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/11/cenotaph-literary-guide.jpg)‘A Splendid Memorial’: the *Literary Guide* on the Cenotaph, December 1920. ### King George V unveiled the permanent Cenotaph on 11 November 1920, on the day the Unknown Warrior was buried in Westminster Abbey. The *Literary Guide* called it ‘the first British public monument to the heroes of a great war’ to bear no Christian inscription and no Christian symbol, and recognised it as a memorial to an army of a million men that had included ‘Moslems, Sikhs, Buddhists, Pagans, Rationalists, Jews, Protestants, and Catholics’. Lutyens went on to design dozens of other war memorials, including the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme (1928–32), which bears the names of more than 72,000 men with no known grave. He was commissioned to design a vast Roman Catholic cathedral for Liverpool in 1929, though only its crypt was ever built. His own beliefs are hard to pin down: he worked for patrons of every denomination, but on war memorials he consistently opposed overt religious symbolism, and was described by his biographer Jane Ridley as ‘notorious for his anti-church feeling’. Instead, suggested Ridley, the ‘aesthetic science of elemental architecture’ became his religion. He served as President of the Royal Academy from 1938, and died in London on 1 January 1944. His ashes were placed in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral. ### Influence Lutyens gave Britain a way of mourning together that did not depend on belief in God. By leaving the cross off the Cenotaph and the Stone of Remembrance, he made memorials that belonged equally to the Christian and the Sikh, the Jew and the freethinker, at a time when the Church expected to speak for the whole nation. Rationalists of his day hailed the Cenotaph as a triumph of humanism, and it remains the centre of national remembrance, where humanists now stand alongside people of every faith to honour the dead. ### Read more [Edwin Lutyens by his daughter](https://www.lutyenstrust.org.uk/about-lutyens/biography/) | The Lutyens Trust ‘The Cenotaph’ and ‘Lord Wolmer Snubbed’, *The Literary Guide*, September 1919 ‘A Splendid Memorial’, *The Literary Guide*, December 1920 Gavin Stamp, *The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme* (2006) Jane Ridley, *The Architect and His Wife: A Life of Edwin Lutyens* (2002) [Humanists to pay tribute on Remembrance Day 2023](https://humanists.uk/2023/11/10/humanists-to-pay-tribute-on-remembrance-day-2023/), Humanists UK The full issues of *The Literary Guide* can be read in New Humanist’s digital archive, available via Exact Editions. Subscribe at [newhumanist.org.uk/subscribe](https://newhumanist.org.uk/subscribe). --- Main image: [Sir Edwin Lutyens](https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw45598/Sir-Edwin-Lutyens) by Howard Coster, half-plate film negative, 1942, NPG x14400 © National Portrait Gallery, London See also ---------- - [ Rupert Brooke ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/rupert-brooke/) - [ Thomas Hardy ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/thomas-hardy-1840-1928/) - [ Conscientious Objectors’ Memorial Stone ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/conscientious-objectors-commemorative-stone/) - [ Sharley McLean ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/sharley-mclean/)