Menin Gate Memorial

The Menin Gate Memorial

Design & Construction

Interpretations

Poems

About the site

Who we are
Rembrella

Location

Photograph 1: British troops leaving Ypres through the Menenpoort during the war (IWM) From October 1914 British and Commonwealth troops began to march through the Meenenpoorte gateway from the city of Ypres onto The Menin Road and into the battlefields of the Ypres Salient. For the next four years of the Great War soldiers from practically every British and Commonwealth regiment passed through this gateway.

Many thousands of soldiers in the British Army lost their lives fighting in the Ypres Salient. The remains of over 90,000 of them have never been found or identified. They are, therefore, buried somewhere in the Ypres Salient with no known grave.

Aerial view of The Menin Gate. (©www.greatwar.co.uk) The site of the Meenenpoorte, known to the British Army as The Menin Gate, was considered to be a fitting location to place a memorial to the missing British and Commonwealth soldiers.

Design

The Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing was designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield. He was one of four Principle Architects engaged in directing the construction of over 1,200 British and Commonwealth cemeteries and memorials along the Western Front for the Imperial War Graves Commission (now named the Commonwealth War Graves Commission).

The Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing (©www.greatwar.co.uk)

Hall of Memory

The memorial is built of reinforced concrete faced with Euville stone and red brick. The single span Hall of Memory (36.5 metres long and 20 metres wide) is covered in by a coffered half-elliptical arch.

At both ends of the Hall of Memory there is an archway (9 metres wide and 14.5 metres high). There are two flat arches on either side of it (3.5 metres wide and nearly 7 metres high). Each of the flat arches is flanked on either side by an engaged Doric column and surmounted by an entablature.

The photograph is taken looking towards the city centre. The spire of the Cloth Hall (Lakenhalle) in the market place (Grote Markt) is visible through the archway.

Menin Gate with the Cloth Hall (Lakenhalle) visible through arch. (©www.greatwar.co.uk)

East Side

Over each of the two central arches there is a large panel for the dedicatory inscription:

TO THE ARMIES
OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE
WHO STOOD HERE
FROM 1914 TO 1918
AND TO THOSE OF THEIR DEAD
WHO HAVE NO KNOWN GRAVE

Above the panel on the east side, looking away from the city and facing the Ypres Salient battlefields, there is a lion lying down.

This feature was included to mark the fact that the Meenenpoorte (Menen Gate) at the start of the war in 1914 was guarded by two stone lions.

Lion on top of the eastern end of The Menin Gate Memorial

West Side

Above the panel on the west side, facing the town, there is a sarcophagus with a flag and a wreath.

Loggias on the Ramparts

Loggias run along the length of the north and south sides of the building on the ramparts.

Construction of the loggias on the south side of the Menin Gate

South side of the Menin Gate on the ramparts. (©www.greatwar.co.uk)

North and South Staircases

In the centre of both the north and the south sides of the Menin Gate a broad staircase leads from the Hall of Memory up to the ramparts and the loggias.

The inscription over the entrance to the northern staircase is:

THEY SHALL RECEIVE A CROWN OF GLORY THAT
FADETH NOT AWAY

The inscription over the entrance to the southern staircase is:

IN MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM
HERE ARE RECORDED NAMES
OF OFFICERS AND MEN WHO FELL
IN YPRES SALIENT BUT TO WHOM
THE FORTUNE OF WAR DENIED
THE KNOWN AND HONOURED BURIAL
GIVEN TO THEIR COMRADES IN DEATH

Standards on parade at the southern staircase at The Menin Gate Memorial (©www.greatwar.co.uk)

Engraved Names

The memorial contains the names of 54,896 officers and men from all the overseas British and Commonwealth forces who fell in the Ypres Salient before 16 August 1917.

Names are engraved in Portland stone panels fixed to the inner walls of the Hall, to the sides of the staircases and inside the loggias on the north and south sides of the building.

This memorial does not include the names of the missing of New Zealand and Newfoundland forces, who are named on separate memorials.

Serving personnel of the British Army stand on parade in front of a few of the 54,896 names engraved on The Menin Gate Memorial. (©www.greatwar.co.uk)

next >> Inauguration of the Memorial

Further Reading

Menin Gate & Last Post, by Dominiek Dendooven (English version). 160 pages, 95 photos. Available to order from www.klaproos.be

Acknowledgements

Extracts of text by kind permission of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

Photograph 1: British troops leaving Ypres through the Menenpoort during the war. Imperial War Museum, Department of Photographs. (Neg. no. not known)