Menin Gate
— — the names that come back at eight every evening.
Not only on a wall.
“A white limestone arch over the road east out of Ypres. Sir Reginald Blomfield's Hall of Memory carries 54,896 names of Commonwealth soldiers lost in the Ypres Salient with no known grave. Every evening at eight, the road is closed and buglers from the local fire brigade play the Last Post beneath the vault. They have done this since 1928.
Menin Gate, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Menin Gate stands at the eastern exit of Ypres in West Flanders, on the road that British and Commonwealth soldiers took toward the front during the First World War. Architect Sir Reginald Blomfield designed it as a triumphal arch reworked into a memorial, and the gate was unveiled on 24 July 1927 by Field Marshal Lord Plumer. Its inner walls and staircases carry 54,896 names of soldiers killed in the Ypres Salient before 16 August 1917 whose graves were never identified. The later missing of that sector are listed at Tyne Cot Memorial east of Passchendaele.
Each evening at eight, police close the road beneath the arch and buglers from the Ypres volunteer fire brigade play the Last Post under the vault. The ceremony began on 2 July 1928 and has continued nearly every night since, broken only during the German occupation of 1940 to 1944, when the buglers carried it on at Brookwood Military Cemetery in Surrey. On the night the town was liberated in September 1944, the buglers were back beneath the arch while fighting still ran in the surrounding fields.
Blomfield faced the gate in white Euville limestone from the Meuse valley, a stone soft enough to take clean lettering at scale and durable enough to hold it in Flanders weather. A stone lion by sculptor Sir William Reid Dick rests above the eastern entrance, facing the old front line. The names were cut by hand by stonemasons of the Imperial War Graves Commission and run in regimental order across panels lining the loggias and stairways. Restoration work completed in 2024 recut weathered panels and replaced lost letters.