'There will never be great architects or great architecture without great patrons,' wrote Edwin Lutyens in 1915. When he died on New Year's Day 1944, he had amassed well over five hundred clients. The great architect and his architecture are well known, but what about his patrons, his clients?

From his earliest patrons, a stream of repressed gentlewomen of intelligence and means, through a galaxy of Edwardian heroes and villains, this book tells their stories. Some of them are famous, others unknown, except as Lutyens' clients: here are Herbert Jekyll, Jennie Churchill, J. M.

Barrie, Hugh Lane, Victoria Sackville, lords, ladies, Souls, bankers, press barons, politicians, and beau monde of Edwardian England, as well as a schoolteacher who inherited a fortune and a prospering Bradford wool merchant. Lutyens and the Edwardians is lavishly illustrated with the human face of great architecture - sketches, drawings and photographs from family archives all over England.