December 28, 2003	Sunday	Ziqa’ad 4, 1424

LONDON: For more than a century, Christopher Wren’s Temple Bar, built after the Great Fire of London as a grand archway to the City, has been languishing just beyond the M25 in a Hertfordshire field. “You can hear the wind, the traffic sirocco, howling through the gap, rattling the corrugated sheets,” wrote Iain Sinclair in London Orbital, his psycho-geographic travelogue about walking round the motorway.

The arch was moved from Fleet Street in 1878 because it caused Victorian gridlock. It was shifted stone by lovely Portland stone and became the gateway to the bucolic Theobalds, country estate of the brewer Lord Meux. He and his wife had a high old time, using a room over the arch for entertaining. Later, though, the arch became a ruin in the woods, fenced off to thwart vandals.

So it’s good news, or so one would have thought, that even as you read this, it is being taken down ready for transport back to London. It is to be re-built not in Fleet Street but as the centrepiece to the new Paternoster Square, a development next to St Paul’s whose honourable aim is to obliterate the memory of its predecessor. That was, you might recall, one of London’s great postwar architectural disasters, a cataclysm of office blocks so awful it made even progressive-minded people share Prince Charles’s wrath. Temple Bar will be the jewel in the gaudy crown that is the new square, a development that consists, in its variety of architectural styles, of a jumble of quotations of varying degrees of aesthetic cowardliness.

No matter that Temple Bar is to be re-erected in the wrong place. No matter that it will be placed in the shadow of St Paul’s, where daily it will be trumped by Wren’s masterpiece. No matter that, instead of being a gateway to London, it will be a gateway to nowhere, or rather to the new Marks & Spencer. No matter that earlier incarnations of the arch witnessed great historical events (in 1356, the Black Prince, after victory at Poitiers, rode through Temple Bar accompanied by his captive, the king of France; in 1381, it was damaged in the Peasants’ Revolt; in 1588, Elizabeth I rode through it on a chariot to commemorate the defeat of the Spanish Armada), while the new Temple Bar will witness nothing worth the name.

Temple Bar will be a triumphal arch through which tourists will pass in search of cheap lunches. It could have been different; the new Paternoster Square development could have revived its noble past. Paternoster Row was the thriving home of publishers and booksellers during the time that Wren’s Temple Bar last dignified London. It might have been a nice touch to revive that industry (one whose built memory was bombed out of existence by the Luftwaffe), particularly now that book retailing in the British capital consists of philistine chains.

But that’s not how things work in London. This is a city that recycles its past, not one that reconstructs it according to notions of authenticity or cultural pride. London’s motto is resurgam, not fidelitas. In this respect, the re-emergence of Temple Bar is a fitting monument to a city doomed to misremember its past as it freely creates a bogus historical narrative from the materials available.

At best, you might see this repositioning of Temple Bar as the kind of creative faithlessness with heritage that makes London such an invigorating place by comparison with metropolises such as Paris.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.