One afternoon in the 1880s, the Indian civil servant and translator Forster Arbuthnot drove his coach and four horses into the Surrey village of Thursley.
He had come to commission a painting from a former infantry captain turned artist, the increasingly eccentric Charles Lutyens, whose family lived ‘like gypsies’ on the wild heath.
A ‘shock-haired boy’, dressed in ill-fitting hand-me-downs from his many brothers, proved to be Edwin Landseer Lutyens, named after the famous animal painter whom his father attempted – not very successfully – to emulate.
Born in 1869, Ned, as he was universally known, never learnt to dress smartly and persisted in cutting his own hair, even when he had lost most of it. But he would grow up to be an extraordinary architect – perhaps the best Britain has ever
