Traveler: Paul Knight
Destination: England

Paul recently journeyed to England and Ireland to study Sir Edwin Lutyens’ design legacy, with his Hasselblad camera in hand.  While focused on the renowned English architect’s work, he also came back with a trove of inspiration from places and moments beyond the Lutyens lens.

In April, 2024, I won the Lutyens Traveling Fellowship: a $7,000 stipend to travel and study the work of famed British architect Edwin Lutyens. I traveled to Ireland and England in November of that year, then in April, 2025, gave a webinar for the Lutyens Trust America to discuss my findings. For this Sight Seeing post, I’ll focus on the non-Lutyens facets of my trip since that has been covered in my lecture. There’s still plenty to talk about. I had my trusty Hasselblad (a medium-format film camera) with me which produced all the square images that follow.

London

Located 40 minutes north of London by train, the original 240 acres which would become Hampstead Garden Suburb was purchased in 1906. London (and all cities at the time, really) was quite dirty back in the day. The concept of the “garden suburb” was new and seen as a solution to the problem — one could work in the city but live outside it in the suburbs. With connections by train, this was (and remains) a great idea. ~ It’s just too bad: for most of America, we got the suburbs, but we forgot the trains. ~

The land plan is by Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, author of “Town Planning in Practice.” Lutyens designed the center of the neighborhood.

Over a hundred years later, this is still a wonderful model to emulate. Most of the houses I encountered were multifamily (duplexes up to multiplexes) on small lots or with shared courtyards. The architecture was a mix of cozy and grand, arts and crafts and classical, built with materials that will last.

Years ago, I read “Longitude,” a book about an 18th-century English clock maker who solved the “longitude problem” and thus changed navigation (and the world) forever. Since then, I had longed to visit Greenwich which featured heavily in the book. There’s the Royal Observatory, the Prime Meridian (0-degrees longitude), and today many of the original clocks referenced in the book are still ticking away in the museum.

The Old Royal Naval College was designed by Christopher Wren (Edwin Lutyens’s favorite architect) in 1696. It’s an architectural masterpiece, standing like an ideal city one sees in a Renaissance painting , with its powerful single-point perspective articulated by all the trappings of Classical architecture: colonnades, cornices, domed towers, rhythmic fenestration, etc. It’s clear why Lutyens was a fan.

Cotswolds

The quaintness of the Cotswolds is something I had heard referenced many times in books and movies. I took advantage of being nearby to take a look for myself. Quaintness confirmed!

I particularly enjoyed Bourton-on-the-Water. In what I assume was the most active part of town, there’s a park with a wide, slow creek with foot bridges throughout, connecting over to High Street. It was all quite lovely.

Cambridge

My trip ended in Cambridge where a conference on Edwin Lutyens was taking place at Downing College. The many colleges and their walled quads were particularly lovely.

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to see more of the photos, you can visit: https://photos.lunar.tokyo/s/lutyens