Temple Bar, Paternoster Lodge, 2 Paternoster Square, the City of London
Temple Bar is the only surviving gateway of the eight that once controlled access to the City of London. Commissioned by Charles II and designed by Christopher Wren (1632–1723), it was constructed between 1669 and 1672 in Portland stone by the masons Thomas Knight and Joshua Marshall. The niches contain statues of James I, Anne of Denmark, Charles I, and Charles II, asserting dynastic continuity after the turmoil of the Civil War and Commonwealth.
The design situates Wren firmly within the European baroque tradition of triumphal architecture. Its format recalls Roman imperial arches, especially the Arch of Titus, with a central passage framed by rustication and superimposed orders. At the same time, it resonates with seventeenth-century reinterpretations such as Claude Perrault’s east façade of the Louvre in Paris (1667–70) and the arches raised for Louis XIV’s ceremonial entries. Wren’s formula was never invention from scratch but careful selection and adaptation: here, a measured Romanising idiom applied with English restraint. The monument thus embodies the transference of continental baroque vocabulary into a London civic setting, shorn of exuberant ornament but retaining symbolic power.
The gateway has endured a restless history. Removed from Fleet Street in 1878, it was re-erected at Theobalds Park in Hertfordshire before its return to London in 2004. Its present site at Paternoster Square, within sight of St Paul’s Cathedral, restores a dialogue with Wren’s greatest ecclesiastical design, though the context is now one of post-war reconstruction rather than seventeenth-century topography.
The name derives from the Temple precinct, associated first with the Knights Templar and later with the Inns of Court. Its original position by the Royal Courts of Justice marked the symbolic threshold between the mercantile City and the legal quarter of Westminster. Temple Bar functioned as both barrier and stage, where royal entries were ritually received and the City’s autonomy ceremonially reaffirmed. In this way the monument united architectural precedent, civic identity, and political theatre, a small but eloquent expression of the baroque language that Wren and his contemporaries adapted to Restoration London.