3-101-170 - "Royal Academy of Arts, London"/Heritage Images

Saint John's Gate, Clerkenwell, c1886. Tudor gate in London. '...the Priory of St. John of Jerusalem, [founded about the year 1100, was] "the chief seat in England of the religious knights of St. John of Jerusalem...The whole of the buildings of the Priory were destroyed by the rebels of Kent and Essex in 1381...it was only in 1504 that Prior Docwra completed the Gate-house, which formed the great south entrance to the Priory. The house was suppressed at the Dissolution, but the buildings were not destroyed till the reign of Edward VI., when the greater part of the church was blown up with gunpowder...Till recently the square preserved an old-world and monastic air, quite gone now that it is opened out by the new Clerkenwell Road." Edward Cave originally printed here the Gentleman's Magazine, which bore on its title-page a picture of the Gate-house.' Description by Alfred Marks. The principal window is a wide Tudor arch with three mullions and many coats of arms. Beneath this window are several shields set in Gothic niches. In 1845 restoration by the Freemasons of the Church included the towers being re-cased in rough stone and the windows re-mullioned. The gate is now occupied by a museum of the Order of St. John, and its associated organisation the St. John's Ambulance Brigade.