Menin Gate, Ypres — war memorial
FrDr · CC BY-SA 4.0

Menin Gate, Ypres

Menenpoort

  • 2 min read
  • 50.852° N 2.891° E

Interesting facts

  • Among the names on the walls are eight holders of the Victoria Cross, the highest-ranking being Brigadier-General Charles FitzClarence.
  • Nearly 7,000 Canadians and more than 6,000 Australians are listed among the missing, alongside soldiers from South Africa, India and the West Indies.
  • Siegfried Sassoon attacked the memorial in his bitter poem On Passing the New Menin Gate, while Stefan Zweig judged it more moving than any triumphal arch.
  • In 1927 Australian artist Will Longstaff painted Menin Gate at Midnight, showing ghostly soldiers rising from the fields; it hangs in Canberra.
  • Two stone lions that flanked the old town gateway before the war were given to Australia in 1936 and now guard the Australian War Memorial.
  • The buglers who sound the Last Post wear the uniform of the local volunteer fire brigade.
  • Lieutenant George Archer-Shee, whose schoolboy ordeal inspired Terence Rattigan's play The Winslow Boy, is among the missing named on the gate.
  • Kipling also proposed the Latin phrase Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, 'to the greater glory of God', carved on the memorial.
  • In 2023 the gate was inscribed by UNESCO as part of the World Heritage site of First World War funerary and memory sites.

Why it is worth it

Every evening at eight o'clock, traffic through the eastern gateway of Ypres is stopped, and buglers step into the vaulted passage to sound the Last Post. They have done so almost without a break since 2 July 1928. The Menin Gate is at once a monument, a working road through the town's ramparts and the stage of one of the most affecting daily rituals in Europe, and it is worth seeing both by day, when the walls of names can be read in quiet, and at dusk, when the passage fills for the ceremony.

The gate stands where the road left the walled town for Menin and the battlefields beyond, the route taken by hundreds of thousands of soldiers marching into the Ypres Salient during the First World War. Designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield as a monumental arch with a long barrel-vaulted hall, it was built by the Imperial War Graves Commission and unveiled by Field Marshal Herbert Plumer on 24 July 1927. A patient lion, standing both for Britain and for Flanders, lies on top. The main inscriptions above the arches were written by Rudyard Kipling and dedicate the memorial 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.

Inside, the walls are covered with stone panels bearing the names of more than 54,000 Commonwealth soldiers missing in the Salient. Even this was not enough: when it became clear the gate could not hold every name, a cut-off date of 15 August 1917 was fixed, and some 35,000 men of the United Kingdom missing after that date were inscribed instead on the memorial at Tyne Cot cemetery, further out in the Salient. The sheer density of lettering, rank upon rank from floor to vault, is what stays with most visitors.

The Last Post is organised by an independent volunteer body, the Last Post Association. During the German occupation of the Second World War the ceremony moved to Brookwood in England, and it returned to the gate on 6 September 1944, the evening Ypres was liberated. The monument underwent a thorough restoration completed in spring 2025.

Getting there

The Menin Gate is at the eastern edge of the historic centre of Ieper (Ypres) in West Flanders, at the point where the road towards Menin leaves the old town through the ramparts. The nearest airport is Ostend-Bruges International Airport (OST), about 39 km away. The passage is open at all times; the Last Post is sounded daily at 20:00, and it is best to arrive early for a place along the walls.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Belgium 18The Most Striking War Memorials 15The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments 173

From the encyclopaedia

The Menin Gate, officially the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing, is a war memorial in Ypres, Belgium, dedicated to the British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in the Ypres Salient of World War I and whose graves are unknown. The memorial is located at the eastern exit of the town and marks the starting point for one of the main roads that led Allied soldiers to the front line.

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