LUTYENS ON THE SOMME

The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, inscribed with the names of the 72,099 British and Empire soldiers killed in the battle whose bodies were never found, was first designed by Lutyens in 1925 to straddle a road outside St Quentin, hence the triumphal arch. Thankfully a new site was chosen - imagine Norbert Dentressangle's trucks thundering through it! - and the arch, completed in 1932, spans a vast, silent space, at its centre one of the War Stones (also Lutyens' design) that were placed in every British war cemetery. 

For me, this and his Viceroy's House in Delhi are Lutyens' two greatest works, among the best buildings of the 20th century. I can only wonder at the skill and restraint that he shows in the massing and detailing of this amazing structure, with its millions of bricks and vast, smooth surfaces of stone, their only ornament the beautifully carved 'hanging' wreaths and the torus moulding (above right) below each block of names, itself carved as a continuous band of wreath. Below, the War Stone, an altar/memorial, with the biblical words chosen by Kipling, who later told Lutyens that it could have been improved only by having no words.