Grand Temple with Grand Master’s throne flanked by deputies’ chairs. The chequered floor design carries significance.
Freemasons’ Hall, a monumental structure that overshadows Great Queen Street between Covent Garden and Holborn, is visibly laden with architectural gravitas, which may be appropriate for an organization inspired by the builders of medieval cathedrals and castles. In popular imagination, the building may also be endowed with great secret significance, representing concealed power dating back a thousand years.
Grand Temple with Grand Master’s throne flanked by deputies’ chairs. The chequered floor design carries significance.
But Freemasons’ Hall is of recent construction, and Freemasons themselves emphasize that it is not a religious building. Freemasonry, they say, is secular and non-political, and is engaged in a multitude of charitable fundraising and volnteering activities. Free guided tours (available up to five times a day, six days a week) are one of London‘s lesser-known pleasures, but far from secret. Freemasons’ Hall’s remarkable interior only qualifies as ‘unseen London’ for those unwilling to look inside. Those who do may find the application of symbolism overpowering. If the Hall itself is not riddled with secrets, its decoration is at least crying out for interpretation.
Marble-clad vestibule.
Freemasons’ Hall is the third masonic building on this site since 1775. It was built between 1927 and 1933, and financed by a million-pound appeal, although the final cost was more than one third greater than that. Put out to competition, the winning design was by architects, Henry Ashley and Francis Winton Newman, a partnership who specialized in functional designs for industry, commerce and public buildings. It is steel-framed and clad in Portland stone, and aligned diagonally to the local street plan.
The First World War and its aftermath exerted a profound influence on Freemasons’ Hall, which was commissioned under the title The Masonic Peace Memorial Building. One of its main features is a bronze casket housing a roll of honour listing members who died in the 1914–18 conflict. The casket is typically elaborate. It rests on an ark lying in a reed bed, symbolizing a journey ended.
It is not clear if one overarching mind was responsible for the decoration of the interior, although much of the metalwork, including the roll of honour casket, is attributed to Walter Gilbert from H.H. Martyn & Co. of Cheltenham, which specialized in architectural woodwork, plasterwork and metal. Some of best work of this firm was for the staterooms of ocean liners, and it can also be found at the centre of Freemasons’ Hall in the shape of the Grand Temple’s massive bronze doors. These are set on balanced hinges and open at the merest pressure of a finger, although each weighs more than a ton. The design cast on the doors shows the building of the Temple of Solomon. Sword hilts lying flat on the surface are handles, the buried sword blades representing peace. The stylized, streamlined figures on the doors may have stepped off a mantelpiece from an apartment of the 1920s. In plain terms, Freemasons’ Hall is an Art Deco building and the style and symbolism are well matched. The chequerboard black-and-white floor of the Grand Temple, which seems a simple classic modernist design, is in fact a symbol of diversity in Freemasonry.
The bronze doors to the Grand Temple, with panels telling the story of the building of King Solomon’s temple: Old Testament imagery in an Art Deco style.
The Grand Temple is used sixty times a year. Lined with marble, galleried and high ceilinged, its main features are three huge gilded thrones for the officials, the central one being for the Grand Master. In places there is an epic scale to the design with the ceiling comprising 1.5 million mosaic pieces set by Italian craftsmen.
On the first floor the processional corridor, 130 ft (40 m) long, is lined with Tasmanian blackwood, a form of mahogany said to be extinct, and is illuminated by a stained glass window with the figure of Justice shown blindfolded. Elsewhere are more than twenty lodge rooms, a library and a museum. The only strictly functional features visible are the internal courtyards glimpsed through the inner windows. These are made of white ceramic self-cleaning bricks. The courtyards do not seem to function as light wells as they do in County Hall, but Freemasons’ Hall is not a gloomy place. It is a registered film and TV location, and has masqueraded as MI5 headquarters in the television show Spooks.
A mosaic with an All-Seeing Eye at its centre, a frieze bearing signs of the zodiac, pentacles and compasses, ornamental blocks of stones both rough and finished: all the visual references in Freemasons’ Hall seem profound. Yet despite the powerful symbolism, it seems that most visitors who take advantage of the tours, including Da Vinci Code enthusiasts, are quickly won over to the notion that Freemasonry is benign, and an effective charitable organization.
The mosaic ceiling of the Grand Temple. To the right is Helios the Sun God, the All-Seeing Eye, and a five-pointed star.
‘That Dan Brown has got a lot to answer for,’ says the guide ruefully to the visitors, ‘but we have forgiven him.’