Lychgate to St James’ Church
Lutyens’s 1900 lychgate at Kilmersdon, designed for the Hylton family, is a small but highly inventive triangular stone structure with a pyramidal roof, quadrant walls, symbolic Trinitarian plan, cobbled geometric paving and simple timber gates, demonstrating his ability to create complexity and meaning in a minimal composition.
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Description
These two designs for lychgates show Lutyens’s invention when dealing with small structures. The Shere lychgate is square in plan, with pyramidal roof and lovely carved detail on the oak timbering inside. Kilmersdon’s plan is triangular. The relation between the triangle, the curve of the side walls and the circle of the paving worked into two concave steps held by the square entrance gives complexity to a very simple thing. Lutyens was obviously proud of himself, for he persuaded Hudson to photograph it and told Lady Emily (on August 28, 1901) that he had written an anonymous letter about it to Country Life ‘as from a passing cyclist’. The letter was not published. (Contributor: Margaret Richardson)
LYCHGATE by Lutyens, 1901, not the typical kind, with four heavy posts supporting a pyramid of Horsham slabs. (O’Brien et al., 2022, p.641)
Bibliography
O’Brien, C., Nairn, I. and Cherry, B. (2022) Surrey. Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England. New Haven: Yale University Press., Nairn, I., Pevsner, N. (1971) Surrey (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England). 2nd edn. Yale University Press.
