the Georgian architect most in vogue Michael Dunne examines the work of James Gibbs, the designer of many famous buildings whose name is surprisingly little known today My story begins with seeing a tourist bus in Piccadilly. On its side were three roundels of well-known buildings: one showed St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square; another, King’s College Chapel flanked by the Fellows’ Building in Cambridge; while the third image was of the Radcliffe Camera, today’s visual shorthand for the University of Oxford. As a Londoner I had known St Martin’s since boyhood; as an undergraduate I came to love the Camera; later still I became familiar with King’s Fellows’ Building. By now, those who know Cambridge will have guessed what links these three edifices. The clue lies in the other name for the Fellows’ Building: the Gibbs’ Building. For all three icons of London, Oxford and Cambridge were designed by James Gibbs between the 1720s and 1740s. Who was James Gibbs? The London Library’s catalogues provide various ways of researching the man and his work, directing the inquirer to different shelf-marks: Art & Architecture; Biography & Biographical Collections; and Topography, for the three cities mentioned. In my searches I came across a folio-size compendium by George Henry Birch, London Churches of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries (1896), illustrating some ‘Remarkable Ecclesiastical Buildings’ erected in London by a quartet of British architects. The four architects discussed were Inigo Jones, Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor – and James Gibbs. The lives of these four men overlapped. Jones, born in 1573, died in 1652, 20 years after the birth of Wren in 1632. Hawksmoor (1662–1736), Wren’s star apprentice, was Gibbs’s senior by 20 years, Gibbs himself being born in 18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
1682 and dying in 1754. Between them the four spanned almost two centuries, and if they were known only for churchbuilding in London, their reputations would be secure. There were other famous architectural contemporaries of Wren, among them Colen Campbell and Richard Boyle, the latter better known as the Lord Burlington memorialised in the eponymous House in Piccadilly. Yet even with the addition of these two other architects there is a fair chance that Gibbs will remain the least recognised. Archival material tells us little about Gibbs’s early life. Born and formally educated in Aberdeen, in his late teens
and early twenties he travelled extensively in Europe before entering the Pontifical Scots College in Rome to train as a missionary for the Catholic church, only to leave the Jesuit institution within a year to concentrate on architecture, studying under Carlo Fontana, the man of the Baroque moment and architect to Pope Clement XI. By 1709 Gibbs was back in Britain, working for wealthy patrons both in his native Scotland and in England. But the great professional breakthrough came when Gibbs was over 30. In 1713 he was appointed one of two surveyors to serve the Commissioners for Building Fifty New Churches in London. Gibbs’s first public
