CONTEXT 188 : JUNE 2026 31 INFRASTRUCTURE Goddards, Abinger Common, Surrey, in two stages, 1899 and 1910. Nestling in the Surrey Hills, it was first a holiday home for ladies of slender means, then extended as a country house, drawing on both occasions on local vernacular tradition. (Photo: Andrew Barnett) DEBORAH MAYS Listing Lutyens Most of the work of ‘Britain’s greatest architect’, Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944), is listed, with varying accuracy and inclusiveness, but for the Lutyens Trust that is just the start. Listing concerns the identification of ‘special architectural or historic interest’, so it should be no surprise that a majority of Sir Edwin Lutyens’s extant designs have already met the criteria and are listed. Similarly, it may be expected that the Lutyens Trust, whose objectives are to promote, celebrate, research and protect the great master’s works, should find both the recognition of this merit and the protection of character to be entirely appropriate. From its inception in 1984, when some 350 Lutyens-related entries were already on the National Heritage List for England (NHLE), the trust has worked to advance understanding and appreciation of Lutyens’s charismatic designs and so to inform, refine and monitor the recognition brought in by designation. Now with 563 listings of his work on the NHLE, it is clear we have all been keeping busy. In September 2025, Country Life, a magazine to which Lutyens owed so much for its tireless promotion of his work, advised its readers on ‘what can be done on a property that escapes the notice of the listed building inspectors’. Anyone admiring and valuing the work of Lutyens, or indeed any historic building, should be alarmed as to how much potential and often irreversible damage this permits. The article was far from the first airing of such ‘advice’, but it underlines both the importance of listing and the need for the keen attention of bodies such as the Lutyens Trust to proposals for change. Knowledge, understanding and appreciation mature and improve, and fresh assessments can be made where new information justifies a reappraisal. Following the introduction of the National Planning Policy Framework in 2013, the trust was keen to advise its members to be vigilant, alive to the concept of curtilage, and to identify and attend ‘applications for buildings affecting the setting’ of Lutyens’s work. When listing began in England in 1947, Lutyens’s architecture and garden designs were still relatively young, but satisfied the Instruction to Investigators (March 1946) for listing that ‘the selection of buildings for the last 150 years should comprise without fail the principal works of the principal architects’. Lutyens’s fruitful relationship with the editors of Country Life and more than three decades of collaboration with the garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, and a series of medals and awards, had ensured that contemporary recognition of his work existed before listing was born. He was first recognised THE LISTING PROCESS IN ENGLAND
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