James Gibbs: Architect

Any Cambridge graduate who receives his or her degree in person does so in the classical surroundings of the Senate House and if, as is likely, that Cambridge student has visited King's College he or she is likely to know the dignified early Georgian domestic block round the corner from the entrance to the chapel. Anyone who has studied at Oxford may well have worked beneath the dome of the circular Radcliffe Library (now part of the Bodleian) whose Baroque silhouette rebukes the varying Gothicism around it. In London, as one looks across Trafalgar Square the Corinthian portico and the stately steeple above it rise up in a situation which makes St. Martin-in-the-Fields the best known, most photographed, of all London's parish churches. Up in the Strand the island church of St. Mary-le-Strand, swirled round on both sides by the remorseless rumble of traffic, soon leads to the church whose steeple is world-famous in that from it one hears the bells of St. Clement's. All these buildings, and many more, were designed by the highly trained, extremely talented James Gibbs. This month sees the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth.