Ceremonial opening of the Temple Bar gates

Temple Bar is opening its gates on Wednesday 11 November, from 11:00am to 11:30am, in Paternoster Square. It's a short, ceremonial reopening of the large wooden gates that mark the old boundary between the City of London and Westminster. The whole thing runs for about half an hour, and it's free to watch.

If you've walked past it before, you'll know the spot: Temple Bar sits in Paternoster Square, right next to St Paul's Cathedral. It was designed by Sir Christopher Wren and completed in 1672, originally standing at the west end of Fleet Street. It was moved to its current location in 2004, and today it's home to the Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects and an education centre for schools, visitors and the City community, run by the Temple Bar Trust.

The ceremony itself is a relatively new tradition, started in 2025. The gates are closed and reopened a few times a year with a bit of pomp — brass buttons and pikes — and it's described as a genuinely odd bit of civic theatre that most passers-by simply walk past. There's a much larger ceremony once a year for the Oiling of the Gates, but this is one of the smaller, more frequent reopenings. It's the kind of thing you might only notice if you're looking for it, but if you're around the City on a Wednesday morning, it's a strange and easy thing to stop and watch.

It's free, and it only takes half an hour, so you can catch it and still make your next meeting. The gates are at Temple Bar, Paternoster Square, London EC4 7DX, and the ceremony runs from 11:00am to 11:30am on Wednesday 11 November.