Long-time London resident and avid museum and theatre-goer. I started this blog in 2014, and got serious about it in 2020 when I realised how much I missed arts and culture during lockdowns. I go to a lot more events than anyone would think is sensible, and love sharing my thoughts in the forms of reviews, the occasional thought piece, and travel recommendations when I leave my London HQ.
Traces of Londinium – A Historic Walking Tour in Roman London
9 mins
A walking tour through the remaining traces of Roman London. This walk is a companion to the earlier tour of Londinium’s Roman walls.Roman sites are few and far between today, but nonetheless anchor us to history and the city’s origins.
We have two guides on our walk today. ‘Roads to Rome’ is a pamphlet containing a walking tour of Roman sites, published by the City of London and its Archaeological Trust. ‘Londinium: a new map and guide to Roman London’ is by Museum of London Archaeology. (I’m the sort of person who had both of these lying around at home already, judge me if you must). I definitely recommend using the former (‘Roads to Rome‘) if you want to recreate this walk. The Londinium map is interesting, but is a literal map of the Roman city, for example showing islands where Southwark now stands, so is less helpful for navigating the streets today. It’s also unwieldy in its unfolded state, so best to read before you head out for lots of background info.
We Begin Our Walk – Cleary Gardens and the London Mithraeum
The walk starts from the information centre next to St Paul’s Cathedral, heading down Peter’s Hill before turning off at Queen Victoria Street. It’s believed that there was a Roman temple on this hill. This is a common theme in archaeological finds; sites retains their purpose within the community even as cultures and peoples change around them. The first proper stop on our walk is Cleary Garden. I have walked past it countless times and not noticed how far back it goes from the road. The ‘Roads to Rome’ pamphlet actually seems to be wrong about the origins of the garden. The pamphlet credits it to work in the 1980s by Fred Cleary, a City businessman. However if you believe this account (and the timing seems more likely), it was laid out in the postwar period by Joseph Brandis, and only renamed after Cleary later, for his work with the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association. The design is clever; it uses materials from war-damaged buildings, but creates pillars and trellises which echo the site’s Roman origins. A 2nd Century bathhouse once stood here, and would then have been on the banks of the Thames. Excavations took place between 1987 and 1989.We have seen London’s Mithraeum on the Salterton Arts Review before. It is under the Bloomberg Building, and under normal circumstances is free to visit when pre-booked. London was multi-cultural from the outset, with the commercial hub of Londinium attracting people from across the Roman Empire. Different ways of life and different religions therefore came too, including the Eastern mystery cult of Mithraism. On this site next to the River Walbrook, members of the cult sacrificed bulls as part of their rites. It is now far below ground, showing how much the level of the city has risen in 2,000 or so years. The Mithraeum first came to light in 1954 during construction of the Bloomberg Building’s predecessor. Until 15 May 2021 you can peer through to see Lucy Skaer’s exhibition Forest on Fire.
A Walking Tour in Roman London – London Stone to Billingsgate
The London Stone is a very peculiar London oddity. Historic records go back to at least 1100, yet nobody quite knows what the point of it is. One possibility is that it’s a Roman distance marker. Today’s stone is a smaller fragment of a larger original. When I first moved to London it was behind a shabby metal grille, but got this nice new home in 2018. Under Cannon Street Station (across the street from the London Stone) a large palatial Roman building once stood.
Fish Street Hill, where the Monument (to the Great Fire of London) now stands, was an important thoroughfare in Londinium. It led from the bridge across the Thames (the first ever built), up to the forum and city hall. In the Roman period, the hill was much steeper than it is today.
At the bottom of Fish Street Hill stands St Magnus the Martyr Church. It is of interest on our Roman walk because of this lump of wood, which once formed part of the Roman wharf. I find it remarkable that this timber is thousands of years old, and yet hardy enough to be kept in a church porch!A nice juxtaposition of old and new London on the way to our next stop.This exceedingly boring office block conceals one of London’s best Roman sites to visit (in non Covid times of course). The Billingsgate Roman House and Baths is a 2nd Century complex, unearthed in 1848 during the construction of a Coal Exchange. You can normally visit between April and November. I went in 2019 and loved it. The outside of the building is all you can see for now, but I’ve cheated a little and added some of my 2019 images below to give you a flavour.
A Walking Tour in Roman London – Tower Hill to the Gherkin
St Dunstan-in-the-East, like Christchurch Greyfriars which we saw on our walk of the Roman city walls, stands as a monument to the Blitz. It was mostly destroyed in 1941, and left as a garden rather than being rebuilt. It’s a peaceful place to stop on the way up to Tower Hill.All Hallows by the Tower, like the Billingsgate Roman House and Bath, needs some imagination at the moment while we can’t get into historic sites. Not only does All Hallows contain the oldest standing part of a church in the City (an Anglo Saxon arch); it also has part of a Roman floor and plastered wall in the crypt. It’s high on my list of places to go when things reopen again.As you may recall from my recent walk around the Roman walls of the City, some of the best remaining sections are at Tower Hill. One is right next to the station entrance, and is a good opportunity to look at construction techniques. And this one at Cooper’s Row shows various historic traces, including the pilfering of building materials over the centuries.We have now passed Aldgate, which was once the Eastern boundary of Londinium. We are standing next to 30 St Mary Axe, commonly known as the Gherkin. In the 1990s, the cleanup from an IRA bomb led to the discovery of a burial of a Roman girl on this site. She was between 13 and 17 years old, and died towards the end of the Roman period. Once the archaeological investigation concluded, the girl was reburied. Interestingly, this was done with sympathy for her as an individual: the reburial approximated Roman rituals, and the inscription outside the Gherkin today is in both English and Latin.
Maypoles, Spitalfields and the Guildhall
One more historic oddity before we leave skyscraper central. The church of St Andrew Undershaft took its name from a big maypole stored next to it until the 16th Century. This smaller version commemorates the story. It’s easy to walk past, and in fact I did when standing only a few metres away on my Sculpture in the City walk.Londinium’s forum stood around today’s Cornhill and Leadenhall. Perhaps the workers on this site are on top of Roman remains as we speak?The forum was a place for merchants to gather, much like Leadenhall Market which stands on top of the site today. Another example of a place retaining its purpose long after memories of its earlier use have faded.The later influence of Rome on London in the form of neoclassical architecture is evident in these images. The Bank of England, Lord Mayor’s Mansion House, and Royal Exchange, are all based on classical temples. We saw the Bank of England in more detail on our walk along the lost Walbrook River.I did not expect to find a Covid testing centre at the Guildhall. But as you can see above, that is indeed what I found! The Guildhall is the site of Londinium’s amphitheatre. Everyone knew there must have been one in a city of this size, but its location was lost. Construction works in 1988 unearthed it, and a line around the courtyard of the Guildhall traces its boundaries. In non-Covid times you can see excavations in the basement of the Guildhall Art Gallery. Photo below from when I went there in Summer 2020.
A Walking Tour in Roman London – St Alphage Garden to the Museum of London
This is another spot we visited on our tour of the Roman city walls. The decorative top part dates to 1477, when the War of the Roses necessitated improvements to the city’s defences.The Barbican highwalks give a really good view of some of the sections of old wall. This particular bit, however, is medieval rather than Roman.The gap between the buildings in the image on the left is Noble Street. This is a great section of Roman wall, which you can admire from a walkway which overlooks its full length. The Roman city walls originally enclosed a semi-circular area from Tower Hill in the East to Ludgate in the West. The section along the river itself was a later addition. A few fragments remain today, but not nearly as much of the original walls as in some other cities.And we finish our walk at the Museum of London. When it’s open, this is a great spot to learn more about Londinium, see original artefacts, and even reconstructed Roman rooms. The plan is for the Museum to move to East Smithfield at some stage, but for now it makes a perfect end point to this historic outing.
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4 thoughts on “Traces of Londinium – A Historic Walking Tour in Roman London”
4 thoughts on “Traces of Londinium – A Historic Walking Tour in Roman London”