Temple Church, London

The Temple Church, a royal peculiar of the Church of England standing between Fleet Street and the Thames in London, was built by the Knights Templar as the heart of their English headquarters and consecrated on 10 February 1185 by Heraclius, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, with King Henry II believed to have been present. Famous for its round nave, for its thirteenth- and fourteenth-century stone effigies of knights, and for a history that runs from the road to Magna Carta to The Da Vinci Code, it is now jointly owned by the Inner Temple and Middle Temple, two of the four Inns of Court at the centre of the English legal profession, whose surrounding precinct is still known simply as the Temple.

The Templars first met in London at a site in High Holborn established by Hugues de Payens, the order's founder, but by the 1160s their rapid growth demanded more space, and they purchased the present riverside site for a great monastic complex with residences, military training facilities and recreational grounds, the brethren forbidden to enter the City without the Master's leave. The church they built follows the order's signature plan: a round nave modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, which the crusaders called the Templum Domini and stamped on their Grand Masters' seals. The Round Church is fifty-five feet across and contains the earliest known surviving free-standing columns of Purbeck marble, ringed by grotesque carved heads that were probably once painted in colours. It was here that new recruits were initiated, entering by the western door at dawn to take their monastic vows of piety, chastity, poverty and obedience in ceremonies so secret that the gossip surrounding them later helped destroy the order, exploited by enemies such as Philip IV of France.

In its Templar century the church stood at the centre of English power. The Master of the Temple sat in Parliament as primus baro, first baron of the realm; kings and papal legates lodged in the compound; and the Temple served as an early safety-deposit bank, the Templars acting as proto-international bankers, holding the royal treasury during the reign of King John and sometimes defying the Crown's attempts to seize nobles' deposits. In January 1215 the church witnessed one of the hinges of English history, when William Marshal, the greatest knight of the age, negotiated there between King John and the barons demanding their ancient rights; Marshal swore on the king's behalf that the grievances would be addressed, and that summer John sealed Magna Carta at Runnymede. Marshal became regent for the boy-king Henry III, and when Henry expressed a wish to be buried in the church, the original chancel was demolished and a far larger one built, consecrated on Ascension Day 1240: a hall church of three aisles of equal width under a vault thirty-six feet high. Henry changed his mind in favour of Westminster Abbey, though one of his infant sons was buried in the chancel. William Marshal himself lies in the Round Church, his effigy beside those of his sons William and Gilbert, successive Earls of Pembroke, among the company of carved knights that includes Geoffrey de Mandeville, first Earl of Essex, and Robert de Ros, a Magna Carta surety.

When the Templars were destroyed and abolished in 1307, Edward II seized the church for the Crown, and it passed to the Knights Hospitaller, who leased the Temple to two colleges of lawyers, one occupying the knights' quarters and the other the clergy's. These colleges became the Inner Temple and Middle Temple, and the lawyers have been there ever since. Henry VIII confiscated the property again in 1540 when he abolished the Hospitallers, providing a priest under the old title "Master of the Temple", a Crown appointment to this day; in 1608 James I granted the two Inns use of the church in perpetuity on condition they maintain it, and it remains their ceremonial chapel, where weddings are held only for members of the Inns. The church saw the theological "Battle of the Pulpits" between Puritans and defenders of the Elizabethan settlement in the 1580s, and Shakespeare set in its garden the fictional plucking of the red and white roses that begins the Wars of the Roses in Henry VI, Part 1, commemorated in 2002 by new plantings of red and white roses. Having escaped the Great Fire of 1666, the church was refurbished by Christopher Wren, who added an altar screen and the first organ; the Victorians restored it in 1841 under Smirke and Burton and again in 1862 under James Piers St Aubyn.

On 10 May 1941 German incendiary bombs set the roof of the Round Church ablaze, the fire spreading through nave and chancel, destroying the organ and every wooden fitting including the Victorian work, and cracking the Purbeck marble columns of the chancel with such heat that they had to be replaced in identical form, even copying the slight outward lean of the originals. In the restoration by the architect Walter Godfrey, elements of Wren's seventeenth-century furnishings were discovered in storage and returned to their original positions, and the church was rededicated in November 1958, having been listed Grade I in 1950.

Music has made the Temple Church famous around the world. A choir in the English cathedral tradition was founded in 1842 under Dr E. J. Hopkins, and in 1927, under George Thalben-Ball, the choir recorded Mendelssohn's Hear My Prayer with the boy soloist Ernest Lough singing "O for the Wings of a Dove": one of the most popular church recordings ever made, a gold disc by 1962 with an estimated six million copies sold. The roll of organists runs from Francis Pigott in 1688 through Sir Henry Walford Davies and Thalben-Ball's fifty-nine years to the present day. The church's celebrated acoustics drew Sir John Barbirolli to record Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia there in 1962 and Paul Tortelier the complete Bach Cello Suites in 1982; in 2003 the choir gave the seven-hour overnight world premiere of Sir John Tavener's The Veil of the Temple, and Hans Zimmer recorded the organ parts of his Interstellar score on the church's four-manual Harrison and Harrison organ, built in 1924 as a ballroom organ for Glen Tanar House and installed here in 1954. Zimmer said that setting foot in the church was "like stepping into profound history", its organ "one of the most magnificent in the world". The all-male choir of eighteen boy choristers on generous scholarships and twelve professional men, privileged as a royal peculiar's choir to wear scarlet cassocks, still sings the Sunday services in term.

The church always has two clergy, the "Reverend and Valiant Master of the Temple", resident in the Georgian Master's House of 1764, and the Reader; the present Master, Robin Griffith-Jones, appointed in 1999, gives regular public lunchtime talks. Among those buried in the church are the jurist John Selden, the Elizabethan lawyer Sir Edmund Plowden, the physician Richard Mead, the playwright John Marston and the novelist, playwright and poet Oliver Goldsmith. Standing outside all episcopal jurisdiction yet on warm terms with the Bishop of London, worshipping in the liberal catholic tradition centred on the Book of Common Prayer, and thronged by visitors retracing the Templar mysteries of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, whose key scene was filmed inside, the round church of the crusading knights remains what it has been for over eight centuries: one of the most historic and atmospheric buildings in London.