One of the architectural glories of London, and a seventeenth century masterpiece, Sir ChristopherWren’s Temple Bar was uprooted in 1878 and summarily dumped as a pile of stones in a vacant lot in Farringdon Road. It was subsequently removed to Hertfordshire and eventually became a forgotten ruin. Only recently has it been restored to the nation’s capital city.
    A bar existed at the junction where the Strand meets Fleet Street from 1293, at which time it was probably no more than a chain or bar between wooden posts. Its name is derived from its vicinity to the Temple, the former English Headquarters of the Knights Templar, subsequently the place where the guilds of lawyers were organised into what would become the Inns of Court.
    All through this country’s history there are mentions of the Temple Bar: the Black Prince, Edward Prince of Wales, after his victory at Poitiers, accompanied by his captive, the King of France, rode through the gateway of the Temple Bar on 19 September 1356 to a tumultuous reception from the citizens of London; in 1381 it was badly damaged in the Peasants’ Revolt. The Temple Bar Gate was ‘newly painted and repaired’ for the wedding of Ann Boleyn to Henry VIII on 25 January 1533 and it was opened for the great triumphal procession of Elizabeth I in 1588 celebrating the defeat of the Spanish Armada. In keeping with tradition the Lord Mayor waited at the Temple Bar entrance to the City to present the keys of the City to the Sovereign.
    This tradition comes from centuries past, for when Sovereigns entered the City of London, the Lord Mayor, who enjoys precedence ‘of every subject’, would surrender his mace and his sword, thus indicating the precedence of the Sovereign. The ceremony is still carried out today on major state occasions when the Queen halts at the Temple Bar to request permission to enter the City of London and is offered the Lord Mayor’s Sword of State as a sign of loyalty.
    The old gate even survived the Great Fire of 1666 and although the principle of rebuilding the Bar was accepted by the City of London there was no money available for replacing any of the City’s gateways after the Fire. The result was that the Temple Bar deteriorated, a great annoyance to Charles II, who made it clear that he wanted Temple Bar rebuilt.
    In July 1669 he summoned the Lord Mayor to explain why the Temple Bar had been allowed to decline into such a poor state of repair. The Lord Mayor mentioned ‘the great summes the City had already expended... towards rebuilding their publique works’ and remarked ‘how great a summe is yet further necessary’. The sum offered by the Commissioners of £1,005 to rebuild the Temple Bar was insufficient but the King overruled the Lord Mayor.
    Charles II was a staunch supporter of the Freemason, Sir Christopher Wren, who had remained loyal to the Royal family throughout the civil war and now was rewarded with the honour of designing a new Temple Bar. The construction of this new structure, the third Temple Bar, was begun in 1670, and carried out with Portland stone from the Royal quarries in Dorset. It was an imposing structure, with a wide central archway and pedestrian arches on either side.
    Above the central archway was a massive stone structure with niches for statues under a domed summit. These niches contained, on one side, statues of James I and his consort, Anne of Denmark. On the reverse side were two further statues, both figures being depicted in Roman costume as was very popular at the time. The first of these was of Charles I who had been executed in 1649 following his trial after the civil war. The second statue was of his rather more fortunate elder son, Charles II.
    These statues cost some £500, a significant proportion of the total budget for the Temple Bar as a whole, and were a reminder that this was as much a Royal edifice as a City one. All four of these statues were the work of ‘a vain, halfcrazed sculptor named John Bushnell, who died mad in 1701’. The total cost of the Temple Bar came to £1,500, some £495 more than the original plan.
    One of the more macabre aspects of the design of this Temple Bar structure was the inclusion of iron spikes along the top of the gate, on which heads of executed traitors were placed. In 1745 at the height of the Jacobite Rebellion it is said that there were so many heads displayed on the Temple Bar that the site became known as Golgotha.
    The attack upon the Temple Bar as an impediment to traffic was begun as early as 1787 by Alderman Pickett and was carried on with great vigour. By 1874 cracks had started to appear in the central archway and the Temple Bar monument was declared to be in a dangerous condition. A meeting of the Court of the Common Council in 1877 resolved to remove the Temple Bar so as to widen Fleet Street, to accommodate increasing traffic and to allow for the building of the new Royal Courts of Justice. However, it was recorded that the Temple Bar be removed only until such time as a decision could be made as to where to reerect the gateway in the City. Work on its removal from the east end of the Strand started in January 1878 and in a period of just eleven days the Temple Bar was dismantled and the stones transported to a vacant lot in Farringdon Road.
    In 1763 Sir George Prescott from Chester purchased the then derelict Theobalds Palace estate in Hertfordshire, which had been the home of James I and Charles I until the Civil War. He constructed a new Theobalds Park mansion house slightly to the west of the original Palace. Sir Henry Meux, from a wealthy London brewing family, purchased the estate in 1882. Some eight years later the stones that make up the Temple Bar caught the eye of Lady Meux, his banjoplaying barmaid wife, who could see how grand an entrance the Temple Bar would make to their Theobalds estate.
    It was thanks to the Meux family that Sir Christopher Wren’s Temple Bar became the only surviving Gateway to the City of London. All of the other old City of London gates, Aldgate, Aldersgate, Bishopsgate, Cripplegate, Ludgate, Moorgate and Newgate, had been demolished before the end of the Eighteenth century.
    But once Theobalds Park was no longer a grand country mansion, the Temple Bar ceased to be a gateway to anywhere. It stood for many years forlorn and fenced off to prevent attacks from those who knew it only as a ruin in the woods.
    In 1984 the Temple Bar Trust successfully applied for permission to remove the Temple Bar from its location at Theobalds Park to Paternoster Square in the City of London. There then followed almost twenty years of fund-raising until, the target being reached in 2003, the structure was dismantled and its 2650 numbered stones were cleaned before being re-assembled using traditional stone masons’ techniques, to create an elegant gateway connecting the ancient, St Paul’s Cathedral, with the modern, Paternoster Square. The re-dedication ceremony for the Temple Bar was held on Wednesday 10 November 2004.
    In 1877 ten London Freemasons petitioned the Grand Master for a Warrant to form a new City Lodge to be called the Argosy Lodge. One evening in late 1877 the petitioners held a meeting in the Strand, and as they were leaving they happened to see the old Temple Bar monument being readied for its removal. The sight of this so moved the petitioners that they decided that their new Lodge should take the title of the Temple Bar in honour of Sir Christopher Wren’s architectural masterpiece. The engraving shown on page 29 was made in 1877 and shows the Temple Bar as the Lodge founders would have seen it on that evening. In 1878, the then City Architect, Sir Horace Jones, who was a Freemason, supplied two blocks of Portland Stone from the old Temple Bar Monument, which were formed into the two ashlars for the Lodge. These ashlars have, over the years, been mislaid, and as a result the Lodge made a request of the present City Architect to have two new ashlars cut from the stone of the Temple Bar. This was done in 2004 at the time that the Temple Bar was restored to London.

Andrew Gill was initiated into Temple Bar Lodge, No. 1728, in 1996 and became its 125th Master in 2003.