St Paul's Church, Covent Garden

St Paul's Church, Covent Garden, is one of the most famous and best-loved churches in London — known affectionately as "the Actors' Church" for its long and close association with the theatre community of the West End. Designed by the great architect Inigo Jones and completed in 1633, it was the first entirely new church to be built in London since the Reformation, and a landmark in the history of English architecture. Standing behind its noble Tuscan portico on the west side of the Covent Garden Piazza, it is a building of historic and cultural importance, and a place of pilgrimage for all who love the stage.

The church was created as part of the development of Covent Garden. In 1631 the 4th Earl of Bedford commissioned Inigo Jones to lay out a grand piazza, with "houses and buildings fit for the habitations of Gentlemen and men of ability", and a church to serve them. According to a story often repeated since, recorded by Horace Walpole, the Earl told Jones that he wanted only a simple church, "not much better than a barn" — to which the architect replied, "Then you shall have the handsomest barn in England". The result was St Paul's, completed in 1633. At first it served only as an auxiliary chapel within the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, but as the Covent Garden district grew it was raised to a parish church in its own right, dedicated to St Paul, in 1646.

Jones's design is a milestone in English architecture. Drawing on the description of an Etruscan or Tuscan temple by the ancient Roman writer Vitruvius, he created a building of severe and deliberate simplicity, dominated by a great portico of the plain Tuscan order — the most austere of the classical orders, associated by the Renaissance architect Palladio with agricultural buildings, and so fitting for the "handsomest barn". The architectural historian Sir John Summerson described it as "a study in the strictly Vitruvian Tuscan Order", almost an archaeological exercise. The imposing portico that faces the piazza, however, has never actually been the main entrance: the altar lies just behind it, so that worshippers enter from the far end, through the churchyard on Bedford Street.

The portico facing the piazza has played its own part in London's cultural life. It was here, beneath the columns of St Paul's, that the diarist Samuel Pepys saw the first recorded Punch and Judy show in England in 1662 — an event marked by a plaque — and the spot is celebrated as the birthplace of British puppet theatre. The same portico is the setting for the opening scene of George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, where Professor Higgins first encounters the flower-girl Eliza Doolittle, immortalised in the musical My Fair Lady.

Above all, St Paul's is the Actors' Church. Standing at the heart of London's theatreland, close to the great theatres of the West End and the Royal Opera House, it has for centuries been the spiritual home of the theatre community, and its walls are lined with memorials to a roll-call of the stars of stage and screen — among them Charlie Chaplin, Vivien Leigh, Boris Karloff, Gracie Fields and many more. The great wood-carver Grinling Gibbons is buried here, and the painter J. M. W. Turner and the librettist W. S. Gilbert were baptised in the church.

Today St Paul's continues as an active Anglican parish church in the Diocese of London, holding regular services and memorial services for members of the theatre profession, and welcoming the many visitors who come to its tranquil churchyard garden — a green oasis amid the bustle of Covent Garden. Its architecture, its history and its theatrical associations make it one of the most characterful churches in the capital.

The church stands on the west side of the Covent Garden Piazza, in the heart of London's West End. The famous Covent Garden Market, with its shops, cafés and street performers, lies just beyond the portico, along with the Royal Opera House, the London Transport Museum, the theatres of the West End, the Strand and the River Thames, and the wider attractions of central London, all on the doorstep.

From its building by Inigo Jones in 1633 as the first new church in London since the Reformation, the "handsomest barn in England", through the first Punch and Judy show beneath its portico, its role in Pygmalion, and its long devotion as the Actors' Church, St Paul's Covent Garden gathers the architectural and theatrical history of London into one building. A Grade I listed masterpiece of English classicism at the heart of the West End, it remains the living church of Covent Garden — and the beloved church of the British stage.