IN 1975, GAVIN STAMP TRAVELLED OUT TO India with Colin Amery, then assistant editor of the Architectural Review, to visit Edwin Lutyens’s buildings for New Delhi, which were beginning to be seen in a more sympathetic light after falling disastrously out of architectural fashion following Lutyens’s death in 1944.
It was the beginning of Stamp’s lifelong interest in twentieth-century classicism and led in 1977 to an exhibition at the RIBA Drawings Collection, Silent Cities, on the tombs that Lutyens and others designed for the Imperial War Graves Commission and, in 1980, to the great Lutyens exhibition, held at the Hayward Gallery.
It was the task of rescuing Lutyens from the condescension of posterity that led Stamp
