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.
'His origins, training and experience seem as if designed to produce that complex of rootedness and spiritual uprootedness that so often gives the artist's special oblique angle of view.
'[5] National Press opinions of his early verse[6] comment on his Elizabethan frankness, simplicity, admirable lyrical impulse combined with tigerish intensity and focus, wit, beauty and blunt realism.
Not only Coppard, but also Middleton Murry, Desmond MacCarthy and W. H. Davies had been attracted to Lay's poetry, and Lance Sieveking emphasised the ways in which the poems resembled those of W. H.
[7] Over many years Cecil Lay made a very detailed study of the behaviour of his pet tortoise, and discovered that it performed what was believed to be a ceremonial dance shortly after emerging from hibernation, following a set pattern of convoluted progress at considerable speed.