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THE SITE AS IT WAS
The Thames washed the edges of the
land upon which the Hall now stands until the construction of
the Victoria Embankment was completed in 1870. The print reproduced
from The Illustrated London News of 4th February 1865 shows the
progress of the construction of the Victoria Embankment, where
Two Temple Place is now situated.
The little lawn to the western side
of the Hall was the site of a small dock, sufficiently large to
accommodate a trading vessel, which belonged to the owner of the
dock, who lived in a small house on the dockside. This house,
together with an Inn behind, occupied the eastern side of the
dock, both situated where the building now stands. At the northern
end of the dock there was a house, opening into Milford Lane,
in which a Lord Chancellor of England was born, whilst on the
western side of the dock there stood a riverside warehouse.
When the first Lord Astor acquired
the land in 1892, it was occupied by the big open-roofed warehouse
of Gwynne's, the Pumping Engineers. A picture of the Temple Gardens,
taken from the River and published in 1861, shows a building marked
'Gwynne' immediately to the west of the Temple. The soil being
river mud, an excavation of between thirty and forty feet was
made, in order to secure a proper foundation and to avoid the
use of piles. In excavating, the lower jawbone of a whale was
found. It was conjectured, from holes had been bored in it, that
this was a present from the skipper to the owner of the ship.
The bone had been set up by the owner as the gateway to his house,
the holes in the jaw having been used to swing the gate on, and
it was buried by Gwynne's when they came to build. Considerably
further down a number of other bones were found, and these were
reported by the late Richard Lydekker, the great naturalist, to
be the remains of oxen and wolves. The oxen had come down to the
water and had been killed whilst drinking.
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