Inigo Jones - what an apt name that was. Salt-of-the-earth, common-man Jones blended with a dash of the exotic, the continental. Jones, the man who brought classical architecture to Stuart England, played both roles throughout his life. One part of him reinterpreted high-flown Italian renaissance architecture for the courts of James I and Charles I. The other part of him was as the King's surveyor, much concerned with overflowing or nonexistent sewers, involved in various fruitless attempts to halt the shanty-town sprawl of London, generally being a one-man combined planning officer and building regulations wallah for the State. His was, to modern eyes, a slightly unfulfilled life. Leapman's account starts over-dramatically, in a dark-and-stormy-night kind of way, with Cromwell's New Model army coming for the aged, terrified Inigo, holed up in the royalist stronghold of Basing House ("the sound of voices raised in panic, of bare and slippered feet scampering along the corridors"). But after a bit more fustian like this and a thumbnail resume of the great architect's life up to that point, it reverts to a conventional biographical structure, which is something of a relief. Jones started his working life as an apprentice joiner, though he quickly gave this up in favour of landscape painting, soon followed by elaborate stage design for royal masques, which led naturally on to real, permanent buildings such as the Banqueting House in Whitehall: a place where masques were performed.
