London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time.
And today’s story begins with a piazza.
Not a London piazza, because before Inigo Jones there was no such thing.
No Covent Garden as we know it. No grand classical sweep. No elegant symmetry. No church sitting there like it had wandered in from Tuscany and decided to stay.
Before Inigo Jones, London built sideways, upwards, higgledy-piggledy, opportunistically, like ivy.
After Inigo Jones, London had geometry.
And that, in a city like this, was practically witchcraft.
He died on this day, June 21st, 1652. Seventy-eight years old. A Londoner born and bred. Baptised at St Bartholomew-the-Less in Smithfield. Son of a clothworker. No noble blood. No silver spoon. Just a sharp eye and a sharper mind.
And what a mind.
If London has a patron saint of reinvention, Inigo Jones is making a very strong case for the job.
Because this man changed how London looked.
Changed how it staged itself.
Changed, in a sense, how it dreamed.
That’s not overstatement.
He was the first proper architect England had.
Before him, if you wanted a building, you got a master mason. A builder. A practical man. Useful with stone and mortar.
Jones was something new.
An architect in the Renaissance sense.
A man with books.
A man with theories.
A man who looked at a building and thought not, “Will it stand?” but “Will it sing?”
And sing it did.
Though his beginnings were gloriously unpromising.
There’s a story, handed down by Christopher Wren, that young Inigo apprenticed as a joiner in St Paul’s Churchyard.
A carpenter.
Sawdust in the hair, splinters in the fingers.
And if that’s true, it’s rather perfect.
Because he began by shaping wood and ended by shaping a city.
But then came Italy.
Ah yes, Italy.
For Inigo Jones, Italy was the conversion experience.
He went there around 1600 and it blew his mind clean open.
Imagine it.
A Londoner used to timber frames, crooked lanes, smoky chaos.
And suddenly there’s Rome.
There’s Venice.
There’s Vicenza.
There’s Andrea Palladio.
Palladio became his north star. Jones practically carried the man around with him in book form, annotating his copy, arguing with it, learning from it, worshipping at its pages.
And when he came back, he brought Italy home.
Not literally. That would have been awkward.
But in spirit.
In stone.
In proportion.
In line.
His great breakthrough?
The Banqueting House in Whitehall.
Go and stand in front of it.
Seriously.
Do it.
It still looks modern.
Built between 1619 and 1622, it is calm, balanced, serene. A perfect double cube. 55 feet high, 55 feet deep, 110 feet long. London was dazzled. It had never seen anything like it.
You can get the measure of its impact when you remember what surrounded it at the time: not to put too fine a point on it, Tudor muddle and medieval clutter.
The Banqueting House must have looked like a spaceship had landed.
A very elegant spaceship.
And, of course, history happened there.
Big history.
On January 30th, 1649, King Charles I stepped out of a window in that building onto the scaffold to lose his head.
Imagine that.
Jones builds one of the most beautiful rooms in Europe and thirty years later it’s the backdrop to regicide.
That’s London for you.
Beauty and blood, hand in glove.
And then there’s Covent Garden.
Oh, Covent Garden.
This is where Inigo Jones really stamped himself on London.
In the early 1630s he laid out the first proper square in London.
A piazza.
Modelled on Italian principles.
Order. Harmony. Space.
The Londoners hated it at first, of course.
Probably thought there was too much room.
Didn’t trust it.
Now?
Millions flock there.
Street performers, opera-goers, tourists, flower sellers, buskers, magicians.
A daily carnival.
All thanks to one man with a ruler and a Roman obsession.
And St Paul’s Covent Garden.
Jones reportedly told the Earl of Bedford he’d build him “the handsomest barn in England.”
That line has survived because it’s marvellous.
And because, standing there today, you can sort of see what he meant.
Plain. Strong. Beautiful in its restraint.
A barn by genius.
He also gave us the Queen’s House at Greenwich.
White, austere, perfect.
The first fully classical building in England.
And if you’ve ever gone there and thought, “Good heavens, this feels continental,” well, there’s your answer.
It is.
Jones imported the Mediterranean into southeast London.
No customs duties.
But he wasn’t just buildings.
He transformed theatre too.
Before his architecture remade London, his stagecraft remade spectacle.
He designed masques for the Stuart court, those mad, glittering theatrical extravaganzas where gods descended from clouds and scenery moved and kings congratulated themselves in allegorical form.
He worked with Ben Jonson.
The two of them quarrelled ferociously.
Artistic egos colliding like runaway carriages.
Jonson thought words mattered most.
Jones thought visual magic mattered just as much.
Frankly, they were both right.
And the argument feels modern.
What matters more: the script or the spectacle?
Hollywood’s still chewing that one over.
By the end of his life, Jones had shaped Whitehall, Greenwich, Covent Garden and old St Paul’s.
That last one’s worth pausing for.
Before the Great Fire, the cathedral wore an Inigo Jones west front.
A vast classical portico.
Gone now, of course.
Wiped out in 1666.
One of London’s great vanished masterpieces.
And then, as London so often does, it moved on.
The Civil War came.
The king he’d served lost his head outside Jones’s own Banqueting House.
The world he’d helped design collapsed around him.
By 1643 Parliament had stripped him of his office.
The great architect of kings was suddenly out in the cold.
And there’s something wonderfully London about the last act.
No grand flourish.
No final masterpiece.
Just six quiet years.
Living in the city he’d transformed.
Back in Scotland Yard for a time. Then, by tradition, dying at Somerset House on this day, June 21st, 1652.
Unmarried. No children.
But comfortably off.
He left over £4,000 in his will, much of it to his loyal pupil John Webb and Webb’s family.
And there’s something revealing in the motto he chose for himself:
Altro diletto che imparar non trovo.
“I have no other delight but to learn.”
That tells you almost everything.
The joiner’s apprentice who taught himself architecture.
The Londoner who went to Italy and came back seeing in straight lines.
The man who spent his life learning how to build beauty.
He was buried at St Benet Paul’s Wharf.
And fittingly, his monument carried carvings of his two great London triumphs: the Banqueting House and the west front of old St Paul’s.
A perfect epitaph.
But the Great Fire took that too.
Even its great memorials don’t always survive.
But the city itself remembers.
Every time you cross Covent Garden.
Every time you glance at the Banqueting House.
Every time you stand in Greenwich and look at that dazzling white geometry.
That’s Inigo Jones.
The man who taught London how to stand up straight.
And on that note, Happy summer solstice. See you tomorrow.