North Bank of the Thames Gate -- Victoria Embankment gardens, City of Westminster, London, UK
N 51° 30.486 W 000° 07.385
30U E 699640 N 5710254
This impressive gate marked the North bank of the Thames from the 1600s to 1862
Waymark Code: WMRY8F
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 08/21/2016
Views: 5
From 1616 to 1862, Londoners passed through this gate to access the north bank of the River Thames. An ornate and powerful symbol, the gate was built in 1616 by the first duke of Buckingham. Stonemason Nichols stone carbed the ornate details and the figures on the arch.
A bronze plaque near the gate reads as follows:
"THIS GATEWAY MARKS THE POSITION OF THE NORTH BANK OF THE RIVER THAMES BEFORE THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE VICTORIA EMBANKMENT IN 1862.
It was built in 1646 by Nicholas Stone.
Master Mason for George Villiers 1st Duke of Buckingham to serve as the water gate to York House which the Duke had acquired from the Archbishop of York in 1624. The arms on the river front and the motto Fidei Coticula Crux (the Cross is the Touchstone of Faith ) on the land side are those of the Villiers family. York House was demolished in 1675 and streets were laid out on the site. In 1893, the gate having fallen into decay, the London County Council obtained parliamentary powers to acquire and preserve it as an object of public interest."
From the Baroque Architecture website: (
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"The Baroque Concept of Building Design: Architectural Sculpture
Another, and decisive, consequence of the conception of a building as a single mass to be articulated was that a construction was no longer seen as the sum of individual parts - facade, ground-plan, internal walls, dome, apse, and so on - each one of which might be considered separately. As a result the traditional rules which determined the planning of these parts became less important or was completely disregarded. For example, for the architects of the Renaissance the facade of a church or a palace had been a rectangle, or a series of rectangles each of which had corresponded to a storey of the building. For Baroque architects the facade was merely that part of the building that faced outwards, one element of a single entity. The division into storeys was generally retained, but almost always the central part of the facade was organised with reference more to what was above and below it than to what stood on either side: in other words, it was given a vertical emphasis and thrust which was in strong contrast to the practice of horizontal division by storeys. Furthermore, in the facade the elements - columns, pilasters, cornices, or pediments - projecting from the wall surface, related in various ways to the centre, which thus came to dominate the sides. Although at first sight such a facade might seem to be divided horizontally, more careful consideration reveals that it is organized vertically, in slices, as it were. In the centre is the more massive, more important section, and the sides, as the eye recedes froth it, appear less weighty. The final effect is that of a building which has been shaped according to sculptural concepts, rather than put together according to the traditional view of architecture."