Life
Lay was born in the village of Aldringham, near Leiston, Suffolk, the son of the village schoolmaster (from a seafaring family) and his mother of agricultural family origins. His father was competent at drawing. Discouraged from mixing socially with the children of the village school, and given a private tutor, Cecil was next sent to the Ipswich School where he was a weekly boarder. He wished to become an artist, but was trained (at first in Ipswich) as an architect, being elected as an associate of Royal Institute of British Architects in 1912. He then travelled in Belgium and the Netherlands for a while, studying painting, and became a close friend of Frank Brangwyn, and also corresponded with Ezra Pound.
After service during the Great War he returned to Suffolk and seldom left it again. As an architect, he designed a series of innovative buildings, mainly large private dwellings, incorporating motifs from traditional Suffolk architecture in ways which were modern for their time. Most of these buildings are in the neighbourhood of Aldringham or Aldeburgh, including the house called Raidsend at Aldringham (an early work), a hall of late Art Nouveau style, with 'elongated Dutch gables, tall narrow windows and subtle pargetting'. He was elected Fellow of the R.I.B.A. in 1925.
Cecil Lay died in 1956 and was buried near his parents in Aldringham churchyard.
Read more about this topic: Cecil Howard Lay
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