Military History | Menenpoort — The Memorial That Ran Out of Wall

Reginald Blomfield's arch stands in the gap in the ramparts of Ieper (Ypres) that British soldiers called the Menin Gate — the eastern road out of the town, and the way to the Salient. Lord Plumer unveiled it on 24 July 1927.

The design assumed the names of the missing would fit. They did not. Inscription stopped at a cut-off of 15 August 1917, and the men who died in the Salient after that date went instead onto the Tyne Cot Memorial to the north-east.

Even the count on the gate is unsettled. The figure most widely printed is 54,896; en.wikipedia gives 54,395; ww1cemeteries.com totals 54,370 and breaks it down by contingent — 40,292 from the United Kingdom, 6,927 Canadian, 6,179 Australian, 560 South African, 412 Indian. The total moves because names are added when a record is corrected and struck out when a grave is identified.

Since 2 July 1928, buglers of the Ieper fire brigade have sounded the Last Post under the vault at eight in the evening. The ceremony stopped under German occupation from 1940 and was kept up at Brookwood in England; it resumed at the gate on 6 September 1944.

The monument had critics from the start. Siegfried Sassoon, who had fought in the Salient, published "On Passing the New Menin Gate" and called the arch a "sepulchre of crime".

Restoration ran from April 2023 to July 2025, about €6 million, funded by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission with the Flemish government and the city of Ieper. Stonework and bronze were repaired, an asbestos layer came out of the vaulted ceiling, and a green roof went on to stop water getting in. Of 1,210 name panels, two needed replacing.

Traffic still stops at eight.

📸 Cover: the interior of the Menin Gate, name panels flanking the dedication inscription — Tim Bekaert, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.