Temple Bar, London
Temple Bar was the principal ceremonial entrance to the
At the bar, the Corporation of the City of London erected a barrier to regulate trade into the City. The 19th century Royal Courts of Justice are located to its north, having been moved from Westminster Hall. To its south is Temple Church, along with the Inner Temple and Middle Temple Inns of Court. As the most important entrance to the City of London from Westminster, it was formerly long the custom for the monarch to halt at the Temple Bar before entering the City of London, in order for the Lord Mayor to offer the Corporation's pearl-encrusted Sword of State as a token of loyalty.
'Temple Bar' strictly refers to a notional bar or barrier across the route near The Temple precinct, but it is also used to refer to the 17th-century ornamental,
Background
In the
Its name derives from the
The historic ceremony of the monarch halting at Temple Bar and being met by the Lord Mayor has often featured in art and literature. It is commented on in televised coverage of modern-day royal ceremonial processions.
History
City jurisdiction and The Temple
A
On 5 November 1422, the corpse of
In 1554, Thomas Wyatt led an uprising in opposition to Queen Mary I's proposed marriage to Philip II of Spain. When he had fought his way down Piccadilly to The Strand, Temple Bar was thrown open to him, or forced open by him; but when he had been repulsed at Ludgate he was hemmed in by cavalry at Temple Bar, where he surrendered. This revolt persuaded the government to go through with the verdict against Lady Jane Grey.[2]
The notable Scottish bookseller Andrew Millar owned his first London shop at Temple Bar, taken over from the ownership of James McEuen in 1728, to whom Millar had been apprenticed.[3]
Wren's Temple Bar Gate
Although the then existing Bar Gate at the Temple escaped damage by the Great Fire of London of 1666, it was decided to rebuild it as part of the general improvement works made throughout the City after that devastating event. Commissioned by King Charles II, and attributed to Sir Christopher Wren, the fine arch of Portland stone was constructed between 1669 and 1672, by Thomas Knight, the City Mason, and Joshua Marshall, Master of the Mason's Company and King's Master Mason, while John Bushnell carved the statues.[4]
In the 1853 novel, Bleak House,
In 1874 it was discovered that the keystones had dropped and the arches were propped up with timbers. The steady increase in horse and cart traffic led to complaints that Temple Bar was becoming a bottleneck, holding back the City trade. In 1878 the City of London Corporation, eager to widen the road but unwilling to destroy so historic a monument, dismantled it piece-by-piece over an 11-day period and stored its 2,700 stones carefully. In 1880 the brewer Henry Meux, at the instigation of his wife Valerie Susan Meux, bought the stones and re-erected the arch as the facade of a new gatehouse in the park of his mansion house Theobalds Park in Hertfordshire, the site of a former substantial prodigy house of James VI and I.[6] There it remained, positioned in a woodland clearing, until 2003. A plaque now marks the site.
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Artist's conception of the Temple Bar Gate at the commencement of the 18th century. Note heads on pikes above the gate.
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Temple Bar by Philip Norman, 1876
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Temple Bar Gate (1878) required timber support props in the 1870s.
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Temple Bar Gate at Theobalds Park, 1968
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Temple Bar Gate at Theobalds Park, 1999
The Gate's present location
In March 1938 Theobalds Park was sold by Sir Hedworth Meux to Middlesex County Council, but the Temple Bar Gatehouse was excluded from the sale and retained by the Meux trustees.[7] In 1984 it was bought by the Temple Bar Trust from the Meux Trust for the sum of £1. In December 2001 the City's Court of Common Council resolved to contribute funds for the return of Temple Bar Gate to the City.[8] On 13 October 2003 the first stone was dismantled at Theobalds Park[9] and all were placed on 500 pallets for storage. In 2004 it was returned to the City of London where it was painstakingly re-erected as an entrance to the Paternoster Square redevelopment immediately north of St Paul's Cathedral, opening to the public on 10 November 2004. The total cost of the project was over £3 million, funded mainly by the City of London, with donations from the Temple Bar Trust and several City Livery Companies.
In September 2022, Temple Bar London, consisting of the gateway and an adjacent building (Paternoster Lodge),[10] was officially reopened by the Duke of Gloucester and the Lord Mayor of London Vincent Keaveny as the home of a livery company, the Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects, providing space for meetings and dining and an education centre funded by the Corporation of London's CIL Neighbourhood fund.[citation needed]
The top of one of the gates was offered for sale by Dreweatts Auctioneers in a London sale of surplus stock from LASSCO on 15 June 2013.[11]
Temple Bar Memorial
"Some authorities believe that the griffin which adorns Temple Bar is a copy of the Welsh dragon. It is Said to be Curiously like it."
Yorkshire Evening Post - Tuesday 01 March 1898[12]
Following the removal of Wren's gate, Horace Jones, Architect and Surveyor to the City of London, designed a memorial to mark Temple Bar, which was unveiled in 1880. The Temple Bar Memorial stands in the street in front of the Royal Courts of Justice.
The elaborate
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Temple Bar Memorial in 2009
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South face, Queen Victoria
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South face, Queen Victoria's Progress to the Guildhall, 1837
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North face, Edward VII, when he was Prince of Wales
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North face, Queen Victoria and the Prince (Edward VII) and Princess of Wales going to St Paul's, 1872
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East face with St Clement Danes in the background.
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Head (west) end of the dragon
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The dragon from the south
In the 1960s, similar but smaller and more subdued
In fiction
Charles Dickens mentioned Temple Bar in A Tale of Two Cities (Book II, Chapter I), noting its proximity to the fictional Tellson's Bank on Fleet Street. This was in fact Child & Co., which used the upper rooms of Temple Bar as storage space. Whilst critiquing the moral poverty of late 18th-century London, Dickens wrote that in matters of crime and punishment, "putting to death was a recipe much in vogue," and illustrated the horror caused by severed heads "exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and ferocity..."[14]
In Herman Melville's The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, he contrasts the beauty of the Temple Bar gateway at the highest point on the road leading to the hellish paper factory, which he calls a "Dantean Gateway" (in his Inferno, Dante describes the gateway to Hell, over which are written the words, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.")[15]
The dragon on top of the Temple Bar monument comes to life in
The dragon also features in
See also
- Dragon boundary mark
- Temple Bar, Dublin, a district of the same name in Dublin, Ireland
Notes
References
- ^ a b ""Temple Bar", City of London". Archived from the original on 30 March 2016. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
- ^ a b c d Thornbury, Walter. "Temple Bar", Old and New London, Vol. 1. London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1878. pp.22-31 British History Online. Web. 21 July 2015
- ^ "The manuscripts, Letter from Allan Ramsay to Andrew Millar, 20 May, 1735. Andrew Millar Project. University of Edinburgh". www.millar-project.ed.ac.uk. Retrieved 3 June 2016.
- ^ Robinson, John. "Decline and Fall of a Monument: emple Bar", History Today Vol. 31, Issue 10, October 1981
- ^ "Christopher Wren's Temple Bar". www.victorianweb.org. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
- ^ Historic England. "Temple Bar (1393844)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 18 April 2012.
- ^ "Theobalds Park - Temple Bar Gateway". www.thetemplebar.info. April 2009. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
- ^ "Temple Bar Gateway". www.thetemplebar.info. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
- ^ "First stone is dismantled - Temple Bar Gateway". www.thetemplebar.info. 13 October 2003. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
- ^ "About Temple Bar: Background". Temple Bar Trust. Retrieved 28 September 2022.
- ^ "Dreweatts". Retrieved 1 August 2017.
- ^ Yorkshire Evening Post - Tuesday 01 March 1898 - https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000273/18980301/032/0003
- ^ Details and photos at Victorian Web.
- ^ "Discovering Dickens: Issue 3". Stanford University. Retrieved 14 October 2019.
- ^ Melville, Herman (1855). Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids (PDF). Harper's Magazine.
- ^ "The Stones of London: Public Art in Charlie Fletcher's Stoneheart Trilogy". The Literary London Journal. 1 September 2011. Retrieved 14 December 2019.
- ISBN 9781473363113.