Temple Bar, Fleet Street, London, Cassell's Old and New London, 1879

About this sheet

An original antique engraving of Temple Bar, the gateway between Fleet Street and the Strand in London, lettered "Temple Bar (1879)" and issued as plate 17 of Cassell's Old and New London.

The great stone arch fills the center of the picture, with its broad central carriageway, two smaller side arches, a curved pediment and two royal statues standing in niches above. Through and around it pours the traffic of Victorian London: a coach loaded with passengers on its roof, a covered wagon, an omnibus crowded with men in top hats, riders, sandwich men with their boards, ladies in crinolines, a newsboy and a running dog. Tall houses close the street on either side, and a church spire rises at left beyond the gate.

The plate is lettered "Cassell's Old & New London Plate 17." at lower left beneath the image, with the title "Temple Bar. (1879)" centered below. There is no artist's or engraver's name.

Temple Bar was built in the 1670s to designs associated with Sir Christopher Wren and marked the western boundary of the City of London, where the sovereign traditionally paused to be admitted by the Lord Mayor. By the 1870s it had become a notorious obstruction to traffic, and it was taken down in 1878. It was rebuilt at Theobalds Park in Hertfordshire and returned to the City in 2004, where it now stands beside St Paul's Cathedral. This plate records the gate as Londoners knew it in its last years on Fleet Street.

Cassell's Old and New London, by Walter Thornbury and Edward Walford, remains one of the classic illustrated histories of the capital.

This is an original antique print, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed. Any framed or interior images are shown for presentation and inspiration only, unless the listing explicitly states that the item is sold framed.