← Places in Oakhaven

Private society

The Temple of the Unsleeping Eye

Popplewick Terrace, Plot P4

An Egyptian Revival lodge on a raised plot, two battered pylons flanking a columned portico, a broad stone stair climbing to gold doors.

Egyptian Revival, nineteen twenty-three, and comprehensively the wrong size for the street it stands on. Two battered pylons flank a columned portico; a processional stair climbs to it in three flights; a pair of owl-headed sphinxes sit on the newel pedestals at the bottom and watch the pavement. The terraces on either side are two up, two down.

Under the portico: gold doors in a stone surround, OCULUS NON DORMIT cut into the lintel above them and a winged disc overhead.
The portico. Oculus non dormit over the door, and a winged disc with an owl’s wings above that.

It belongs to the Order of the Unsleeping Eye, Oakhaven Chapter No. 357, who have met here since the year it was built. Over the doors there is a winged disc, and the wings are an owl’s rather than a falcon’s - the owl is the Order’s guardian, and where another society would carve a beehive for industry, this one carves a lantern. The motto is Oculus non dormit. The eye does not sleep.

A hall with a black and white chequered floor, palm-capital columns and lanterns along the wall.
The Outer Court, which is as far as most visitors get.

The membership is drawn from the sort of Oakhaven that signs things: solicitors, a surveyor, two councillors, the man who used to run the bus depot. They are unfailingly polite about it and will tell you it is a dining club with an unusual amount of architecture. Inside there is an outer court, a refectory and a library, and below ground a small bare room they call the Chamber of Reflection, which is exactly as cheerful as it sounds. Cut over the inner door are the letters V·I·G·I·L·A·T - go within, enter, and hold fast the hidden stone.

A long dining table and benches in dark wood under wall lanterns.
The refectory. They will tell you it is a dining club with an unusual amount of architecture.
A library lit by wall lanterns: a stone globe carved with a world map, standing in its cradle on a reading table, bookcases behind.
The library. A terrestrial globe and a celestial one, and nobody will tell you which is which.

Of an evening the car park fills in a way you could set a watch by. Fourteen black saloons come up the access road one after another, each to its own bay under the cast-iron lamps, and fourteen men get out and walk up the stair without looking round.

Beyond that is the Temple, and the Temple is not shown to visitors. What is said about it is that the room is a double cube, that the floor is chequered black and white, and that somewhere in that floor there is a single tile of crimson. Nobody who has been in there will confirm any of it, which in Radworth counts as confirmation.

A tall ceremonial room seen from a gallery: chequered floor, an altar, a canopied throne at the far end, lanterns down both walls.
The Temple. We are not going to say how this photograph was taken.

They are also, quietly, buyers. If something old comes up out of the ground under this town - and things do - the Order will pay more for it than any shop in Oakhaven, and will not ask where it came from. What they want it for is their own business, and how much of that business you choose to look into is yours. People who leave it alone find the Order generous. People who do not find the doors heavier.

A low brick undercroft with a row of lanterns receding into the dark.
Below ground. The Chamber of Reflection is off this passage, and is exactly as cheerful as it sounds.

This one has been here since 1923, it meets on a Tuesday, and you can be let in. Perhaps secret societies are the one thing GTA 6 doesn’t have that we do!

Their leaflet

The Order prints its own. It answers the questions people ask, and every answer is perfectly reasonable.

The front of a cream letterpress leaflet printed in black and a brass ink. An Egyptian winged disc with an owl's wings spreads either side of an eye set in a hexagon, above the words THE ORDER OF THE UNSLEEPING EYE, Oakhaven Chapter No. 357, founded 1923, and the motto OCULUS NON DORMIT.The back of the same leaflet, headed QUESTIONS WE ARE OFTEN ASKED, with eight short questions and answers in two colours, and a notice at the foot flanked by two drawn pillars reading IF YOU WISH TO JOIN, PLEASE ASK AN EXISTING LODGE MEMBER.

Tap either side to read it.

Elsewhere in Oakhaven