English family of masons. John Townesend I (1648–1728), a labourer’s son, was apprenticed in 1664 to Bartholomew Peisley, a mason of St Giles’s Parish, Oxford, and became a freeman of the city in 1674. By the 1690s he had emerged as the most important of several relatively minor Oxford masons. In 1691–4 at Pembroke College he built part of the front range and the classical gate-tower (gothicized in 1829–30), in 1692–5 at Queen’s College the library, presumably to designs by Henry Aldrich, and in 1695 at Pembroke again the Master’s Lodgings. In 1701–3 at Exeter College he made part of the front range and the classical gate-tower (gothicized in 1834), the design of which was probably shared with his oldest son William Townesend (b Oxford, 1676; d Oxford, 1739). In 1705–11 John I built the kitchen-yard of John Vanbrugh’s Blenheim Palace and in 1707, at Queen’s College again, the north range of the Back Quadrangle. John I followed traditional forms and used classical motifs naively. The Pembroke lodgings had six small gables, cross-windows and an off-centre, shell-headed doorway, while the Exeter tower, set in a battlemented Gothic range, had a balustrade above a curved pediment. William Townesend may have contributed the high rusticated base and paired Ionic pilasters, or Aldrich himself may have suggested these. Known as Old Pincher by his men, John Townesend I was elected to the City Council in 1700, retired from building in 1712 and was Mayor of Oxford in 1720/21. He is buried in St Giles’s churchyard beneath an elaborate altar-tomb topped with a strange mitre-like device, no doubt of his own design.