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It was Dame Henrietta who insisted that the "houses for worship and for learning" should stand on the central hill at the apex of the Suburb, although when Lutyens responded to this idea on a monumental scale she argued for a more informal and cosy approach. Both Lutyens and the Dame at first wanted to have shops in the centre of the Suburb, but eventually the Trust decided to exclude them, thus losing much of the potential attraction of the centre. Lutyens's early sketches (in the RIBA Drawings Collection) show clearly that it was his intention from the start to place the two churches, Anglican and Free, where they now stand, with flats as well as houses almost wholly enclosing a square next to each of them.
Central Square was to be enclosed on three sides by the two churches and the Institute, with the western side left as open landscape. This was not merely because Dame Henrietta liked the view of Harrow church there was probably a conscious desire to make this new town a visible counterpart to that old town - but also because to Lutyens and to Unwin it was essential to place natural landscape in direct counterpoint with civilised architecture; the mixing of Man and Nature was the mainspring of the Suburb idea.
To the east is the Institute, with its cupola, almost over civilised, like an off-cut from Williamsburg, and connecting them is a formal avenue, flanked by rows of trees, broken into by a cross-avenue connecting up the steeples of the churches. Lutyens's sketch for the landscaping was, as Dame Henrietta recalls, dashed off in a letter from Marseilles when he was en route for Delhi. At the western end of the Avenue is Lutyens's memorial to the Dame herself, a kind of classical wellhead.
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