© 2021 Happened Here. All Rights Reserved.

Inigo Jones’s Covent Garden, Part 2

By Hamish Roberts

“So, tell me, master-builder. How would you change London?”

Inigo leaves Bedford House at the onset of twilight, the empty sky a dimming blue. This is

his favoured hour, when glares and shadows resolve to a soft hue that eases into the eye. The

stillness of the light invites Inigo’s mind to move. He rises above Long Acre’s knitted streets, and

London inflates beneath him: turrets, spires, townhouses and taverns, high-walled gardens and

alleyways. Such a hodgepodge, he thinks— every gap filled, every corner utilised to its own,

singular end. It works — the chaos breeds a wild kind of harmony; but the master-builder cannot

say how he'd change it, any more than he’d know how to rearrange a forest. If he had forty acres

in an Italian city, Venice or Turin, well then, there would be a style to disrupt, an orthodoxy to

subvert. But no style unites London, so he cannot change the city by altering a mere patch of it: it

will remain the jumble that it is.

Well, what then, Inigo thinks back in his study, as he carefully places lanterns to recreate the

softness of dusk. He takes a breath, and shuts his eyes, hoping to again rise above the city— but

now his mind buckles and falls, landing in the middle of an old argument with his one-time

collaborator, the playwright Ben Jonson. Jonson always reduced Inigo’s stages and costumes to

something…mechanical, as if they were simple realisations of Jonson’s characters and verses.

Inigo’s retort: your words, Jonson, are just one kind of idea. I have ideas aplenty — of space,

symmetry, and colour. Inigo has toured Italy; he has seen Palladio’s work first-hand in Florence,

Genoa and Venice. Jonson may quote the ancients; he has touched Roman ruins with his bare

hands. In his latest poem, Jonson accused his old collaborator of terrible hubris, of correcting
 © 2021 Happened Here. All Rights Reserved.

Euclid and “overbeating us, with mistook names out of Vitruvius!” But Inigo does not elevate

himself above anyone — he sees only the abstract forms around which all their disciplines orbit.

There are harmonies revealed by Euclid and music alike. One’s gaze moves with steady

satisfaction across Roman temples because, as Plato taught, certain proportions resemble forms

one already understands. Inigo recognises the shapes and symmetries that structure Jonson’s verse.

It is you, Jonson, who are blind to the poetry of timber and stone.

Stop, Inigo commands himself. Reliving that petty squabble is a poor use of your imagination.

He tries once more to dream himself back above the city, but no, he is stuck where he is, inside

himself, his thoughts as congested as the streets of London. An Italian city wouldn’t narrow my

mind like this, he thinks. In Turin, there are open spaces other than the sky.

Suddenly, Inigo sees it: the idea. Distractions fall away, releasing his mind to rise effortlessly

back above the city, and there it is, everywhere, the capital’s unifying quality: use. It is partitioned

to its outskirts by use, by working, living or praying. To change London, he must make something

useless. To be…wandered through.