Temple Church, London

In the middle of the twelfth century the Knights Templar in London met at a site in High Holborn, in a structure originally established by Hugues de Payens; that ground had historically been the location of a Roman temple in Londinium. The order grew so rapidly that by the 1160s that site had become too confined, and the Templars bought the ground between Fleet Street and the Thames for a larger monastic complex as their headquarters in England. Alongside the church, the new compound held residences, military training facilities and recreational grounds for the military brethren and the novices, who were not permitted to go into the City without the permission of the Master of the Temple.

The building comprises two separate parts: the original circular church, called the Round Church and now serving as a nave, and a rectangular chancel adjoining it on the east side, built roughly half a century later. The round church, 55 feet (17 m) across, contains within it a circle of the earliest known surviving free-standing Purbeck marble columns, and it is known both for that round plan, a common design feature of Templar churches, and for its thirteenth- and fourteenth-century stone effigies.

Because the Dome of the Rock stood on the site of the Temple of Solomon, the Knights Templar had made their headquarters for much of the twelfth century in the Al-Aqsa Mosque beside it. The Templum Domini, as they called the Dome, appeared on the seals of Grand Masters such as Everard des Barres and Renaud de Vichiers, and, with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on which it was based, became the architectural model for round Templar churches across Europe. The London church was consecrated on 10 February 1185 by Heraclius, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and King Henry II, who reigned from 1154 to 1189, is believed to have been present.

The Templar order was very powerful in England, and the Master of the Temple sat in parliament as primus baro, the first baron in precedence of the realm. Kings and the legates of the Pope used the compound regularly as a residence. During the reign of King John, from 1199 to 1216, the church served as the royal treasury, a function supported by the role of the Knights Templar as proto-international bankers, and the Temple also worked as an early safety-deposit bank, sometimes in defiance of the Crown's attempts to seize the funds of nobles who had entrusted their wealth there.

In January 1215 William Marshal acted as a negotiator at a meeting in the Temple between King John and the barons, who demanded that the king uphold the rights enshrined in the Coronation Charter of his predecessor and elder brother, King Richard I. Marshal swore on the king's behalf that the barons' grievances would be addressed in the summer, which led to the king's signing of Magna Carta in June. Marshal later served as regent during the reign of John's infant son, King Henry III, who reigned from 1216 to 1272.

Henry III expressed a desire to be buried in the church, and to accommodate that wish the original chancel was pulled down in the early thirteenth century and a larger one built in its place, the basic form of which survives. It was consecrated on Ascension Day 1240 and comprises a central aisle and two side aisles of identical width under a vault 36 feet 3 inches (11.05 m) high. One of Henry's infant sons was buried in the chancel, but the king later altered his will to reflect a new wish to be buried in Westminster Abbey. Others were buried in the church: Geoffrey de Mandeville, 1st Earl of Essex, who died in September 1144; William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke (1146 to 1219); William Marshal, 2nd Earl of Pembroke (1190 to 1231); Gilbert Marshal, 4th Earl of Pembroke (1194 to 1241); Robert de Veteripoint, Sheriff of Westmoreland, who died in 1228; and Silvester de Everdon, Bishop of Carlisle and Lord Chancellor of England, who died in 1254.

The church was originally used, among other purposes, for Templar initiation ceremonies. In England the rite involved new recruits entering the Temple by the western door at dawn; the initiates went into the circular nave and there took monastic vows of piety, chastity, poverty and obedience. The details were always a closely guarded secret, and that secrecy later contributed to the order's downfall as gossip and rumours spread about possible blasphemous usages, which enemies such as King Philip IV of France manipulated and exploited to fabricate a pretext for suppression. Most commentators consider the primary cause of the downfall to have been the order's quasi-supra-national independent network and great wealth across Europe, and the jealousy both caused in secular kingdoms.

After the destruction and abolition of the Knights Templar in 1307, King Edward II took control of the church as a Crown possession. It was later given to the Knights Hospitaller, who leased the Temple to two colleges of lawyers: one moved into the part of the precinct previously used by the knights, the other into the part used by their clergy, and the two shared the church between them. Those colleges evolved into the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple, two of the four London Inns of Court.

In 1540 the church passed to the Crown once more, when King Henry VIII abolished the Knights Hospitaller in England and confiscated their property. Henry provided a priest for the church under the former title Master of the Temple. In the 1580s the building was the scene of the Battle of the Pulpits, a theological conflict between the Puritans and supporters of the Elizabethan Compromise. Shakespeare knew the site, and the church and its garden appear in Henry VI, Part 1 as the setting for the fictional scene in which two roses of York and Lancaster are plucked and the Wars of the Roses begin; new white and red roses were planted in the modern gardens in 2002 to mark it. Under an agreement made by King James I in 1608 the two Inns were granted the use of the church in perpetuity on condition that they support and maintain it, and they use it still as their ceremonial chapel.

The church escaped damage in the Great Fire of London in 1666, but it was refurbished by Christopher Wren, who made extensive modifications to the interior, adding an altar screen and installing the church's first organ. A Victorian restoration followed in 1841 under Smirke and Burton, who decorated the walls and ceiling in high Victorian Gothic in an attempt to return the church to what they took to be its original appearance. A choir in the English cathedral tradition was established in 1842 under the direction of Dr E. J. Hopkins, and it soon earned a high reputation. In 1850 a fire that began in the furnace room badly damaged the chorister's room above it and threatened the organ standing behind that room's wall, but was put out before it could spread further. Further restoration work was carried out in 1862 by James Piers St Aubyn.

In 1927 the Temple Choir, under George Thalben-Ball, became world-famous for its recording of Mendelssohn's Hear My Prayer, with the solo O for the Wings of a Dove sung by Ernest Lough. It became one of the most popular recordings ever made by a church choir, reaching gold disc status of a million copies in 1962 and an estimated six million sales since.

On 10 May 1941 German incendiary bombs set the roof of the Round Church alight, and the fire spread quickly to the nave and the chapel. The organ and all the wooden parts of the church, the Victorian renovations among them, were destroyed, and the Purbeck marble columns in the chancel cracked in the intense heat. Although they still gave the vault some support, the columns were judged unsound and were replaced in identical form, the replacements reproducing the slight outward lean of the originals. The Master's House burned down the same night. Visiting the Temple on business on 3 December 1941, the Hackney air raid warden and diarist Thomas E. Browne recorded that Brick Court no longer existed, its place taken by a static water supply, and that while the church's outside fabric was sound there had been a tremendous fire inside, with immense damage all around.

During the rebuilding under the architect Walter Godfrey it emerged that elements of Wren's seventeenth-century work had survived in storage, and these were put back in their original positions. The church was designated a Grade I listed building on 4 January 1950 and was rededicated in November 1958. Its acoustics have continued to draw musicians: Sir John Barbirolli recorded a celebrated performance of Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis there in 1962, at the suggestion of Bernard Herrmann, and Paul Tortelier recorded the complete Bach Cello Suites in the church in April 1982. A four-manual Harrison and Harrison organ, built in 1924 as a private ballroom instrument at Glen Tanar House, was installed in 1954, and a chamber organ by Robin Jennings was added in 2001. Sir John Tavener's The Veil of the Temple was given its world premiere by the choir over seven hours of an overnight vigil in 2003, and was performed the following year at the Lincoln Festival in New York City and, in a concert version, at the BBC Proms. Hans Zimmer chose the church for the organ parts of his score for Interstellar, played by the former organist Roger Sayer.

The church is jointly owned today by the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple, the Inns of Court that are the bases of the English legal profession, and it serves both as a private chapel, holding regular services including Holy Communion and Mattins on Sunday mornings, and weddings for members of the two Inns. It has always been a royal peculiar, a status that gives its choristers the privilege of scarlet cassocks and places the church outside any episcopal or archiepiscopal jurisdiction. There are always two clergy, the Master of the Temple and the Reader of the Temple; the Master's title recalls that of the head of the old Templar order, and the Crown appoints him under a right reserved when James I granted the church to the two Inns in 1608. The official residence is the Master's House, a Georgian townhouse built beside the church in 1764, and the Reverend Doctor Andrew Bowyer was appointed Master in 2026. In 2025 the church was described as standing in the liberal catholic tradition of the Church of England and as centred on the Book of Common Prayer, and the recruitment pack for the next Master stated that they would be required to support the blessing of same-sex relations.