Christopher Wren's Temple Bar Gate returned to London in 2003 after being removed for road widening in the 1880s.
From the Temple Bar Gate history website: (
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"History of Temple Bar
Sir Christopher Wren’s Temple Bar marked the gateway to the City of London for 200 years. Then it was rebuilt at Theobalds Park, Cheshunt to form a grand entrance to a country estate.
Today, Temple Bar has been rebuilt at Paternoster Square, opposite St. Paul’s Cathedral in the heart of London.
Sir Christopher Wren’s Temple Bar
Temple Bar is best remembered as Sir Christopher Wren’s monument, and although no documents survive to prove he designed it, Wren’s son retained original drawings for the work. The old gate survived the Great Fire of 1666, but had fallen into disrepair. Under the orders of Charles II Temple Bar was rebuilt with highly prized Portland stone from the Royal quarries in Dorset, demonstrating the importance that the king placed on the project. One third of the total cost of £1,500 was spent on sculpturing four impressive regal statues to adorn the new stone gateway. On the east side of the gateway, in two niches, were stone statues of Queen Anne of Denmark and James I, and on the west side were the statues of Charles I and Charles II. It was a statement which illustrated that Temple Bar was as much a royal monument as a city one.
During the eighteenth century Temple Bar was used to display the heads of traitors on iron spikes which protruded from the top of the main arch. One story goes that the Rye House plotters drew so much attention that telescopes were offered for hire in order to gain a better view. The last heads to be displayed were those of Towneley and Fletcher, who were taken at the Siege of Carlisle and executed in 1746. For some time after Towneley’s execution his head was displayed on Temple Bar until a faithful family retainer secured possession of it and brought it back to Burnley, where for many years it was kept in a basket covered with a napkin in the drawing room at Towneley Hall.
Removal of Temple Bar from Fleet Street
Wren’s Temple Bar stood in Fleet Street for just over 200 years until a variety of factors dictated its removal. Firstly, and most importantly, the roadway needed widening to relieve the heavy traffic and the building of the Royal Courts of Justice resulted in the decision to remove the somewhat costly and outdated Temple Bar. The Corporation of London however, had a strong attachment to the Bar and rather than see it cleared away, it was taken down brick by brick, beam by beam, numbered stone by stone, and stored in a yard off Farringdon Road until a decision for its re-erection could be reached.""
This article in the Guardian celebrated Wren's Temple Bar Gate's return: (
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"Last of the City's gates returns home after a century in a forest
Temple Bar is coming home. London's last surviving gate, a Grade I listed building, has spent more than a century buried in Hertfordshire woodland, drowning in nettles and brambles, targeted by pigeons and vandals.
Its days in the countryside are now numbered and it will be on the road again as soon as its more than 1,000 stones are numbered and dismantled.
By the end of next year it should be standing once more in the capital, relocated from its original site in Fleet Street to form a gateway into the new piazza at Paternoster Square beside St Paul's Cathedral.
The monument has had a hard life: it lost the royal crest, the lion and the unicorn and the two little dragons by the end of the 18th century, along with the spikes on which heads and other body parts of executed traitors were displayed.
The damage continued when it was moved. The statues of four monarchs were put into store to protect them.
Adam Stone, project manager for Cathedral Works - the specialist masons contracted by the Corporation of London to take Temple Bar safely back to London - said one of the four, Charles II, looked as if somebody had taken a shotgun to him.
The campaign to keep Temple Bar in London began even before the arched gateway was demolished in 1878.
"It has taken just a little longer than we expected, but I never had any doubt that we would succeed," said Colonel JCM Ansell, administrator of the Temple Bar Trust, 15 years after the trust bought the gate for £1, confident that its return to London was imminent.
The gate dates from 1669, when Charles II summoned the lord mayor and tore strips off him for the deplorable state of the old wooden gate. The mayor explained that he had the aftermath of the great fire of London to deal with, but the king was obdurate.
He ordered Christopher Wren to create a new one and granted Portland stone for it from his royal quarries.
The boundary between the City of London and Westminster was the last survivor of the medieval gates of the city. The Black Prince rode through it after the Battle of Poitiers, with his prisoner, the king of France. It was painted up for the wedding of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII. After the defeat of the Armada, Elizabeth I was carried through it to a thanksgiving service at St Paul's. When Nelson's funeral passed through, the whole gate was hung with black velvet.
A 19th century engraving shows a policeman on point duty holding up a line of traffic until a procession of stagecoaches - the top hats of the passengers on top barely fitting under the arch - got through.
It was the new law courts building which sealed its fate: apart from the traffic jams, Wren's classical arch looked peculiar and old-fashioned beside the Gothic courts. The corporation agreed the gate had to go but decided to store it instead of selling the stones as building rubble.
Col Ansell said the next heroine of the story was an improbably romantic one: Valerie, a London barmaid, who married the brewery owner Sir Henry Meux. She was beautiful, dashing - she drove a coach and pair of zebras - and strong willed.
When she discovered that a piece of England's history was scattered all over a builder's yard she bullied her husband into acquiring the stones and reconstructing the arch as a gateway to his country home, Theobald's Park, near Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire. The job cost £10,000, but reversing it will cost 20 times that.
The corporation always had misgivings about Temple Bar, and kept an interest in the stones even when they moved to the country.
Joyce Nash, the chief commoner, inheritor of the office which took the decision both to build the gate and to exile it, said: "The Corporation of London takes great care to look after all the City buildings, both old and new, and I welcome Temple Bar's homecoming journey to its rightful place in the City."
The site of Temple Bar was marked with the monument which still stands, a tall pillar with statues of Victoria and Albert, topped with a dragon."