St Paul's Church, Covent Garden
— — the actors' church, with a portico that has watched a city.
Not only on a wall.
“On the west side of Covent Garden piazza, Inigo Jones built a barn of a church in 1633 with a great Tuscan portico facing east across the square. The portico is famous as the spot where Samuel Pepys saw a Punch and Judy show in May of 1662, the first such performance recorded in England. The interior is one long quiet room of plaster and wood, with memorials to actors lining the walls, from Charles Macklin to Vivien Leigh. Outside, jugglers still work the piazza. Inside, the room holds its breath.
St Paul's Church, Covent Garden, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
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The place, in three passes.
St Paul's, Covent Garden stands on the west side of the piazza laid out by Inigo Jones for the 4th Earl of Bedford in the 1630s. The church was consecrated in 1638. Its great Tuscan portico faces east across the square, although the working entrance is on the west, off Bedford Street, because the altar is at the liturgical east as Anglican rite required. The church has been the parish church of the theatre district since the eighteenth century, which is the source of its informal name, the Actors' Church.
The building is one of the earliest classical churches in England, a deliberate exercise by Jones in Palladian restraint. The Earl had asked for something not much better than a barn; Jones answered that it should be the handsomest barn in England. The portico is supported by four Tuscan columns and was restored after a serious fire in 1795 destroyed much of the roof. The interior memorials read like a hall of the English stage: Macklin, Ellen Terry, Charles Chaplin, Boris Karloff, Vivien Leigh, Hattie Jacques.
The church is open most weekdays through the afternoon, typically from late morning through about three or four o'clock, with services on Sunday morning and a sung Eucharist. Entry to the church and the small garden behind is free. The piazza in front, run as a market since 1654 and rebuilt as the Market Building in 1830, has been a pedestrian precinct since the wholesale market relocated to Nine Elms in 1974. Street performers work the square under licence from the Covent Garden Area Trust.