Roman London Walk - Structures, artefacts, art and lifestyles

‘Most renowned for the quantity of merchants and goods’, wrote Tacitus of London on the eve of its destruction by Boudicca in ad 60/61. Commerce brought London into being; it became the chief administrative centre and largest city of Roman Britain, with the most capacious basilica north of the Alps. 

Despite intensive building and rebuilding in subsequent centuries, powerfully evocative traces of the Roman city remain. These have dramatically increased as a result of Second World War bombing and emergency archaeology in advance of obliteration by foundations for skyscrapers. Knowledge of the Roman city and of the lives of its people has made huge strides in recent years.

There are well-preserved sections of the Roman walls at Tower Hill and beside the Barbican, a fort near Cripplegate, an amphitheatre under the Guildhall and a large residential complex and baths at Billingsgate. Construction of the Bloomberg Building yielded some astonishing wooden writing tablets among numerous other artefacts. All are testimony to changing Roman lifestyles and the waxing and waning of Londinium's fortunes. The newly re-displayed Mithraeum reveals that a sophisticated and cosmopolitan Mediterranean culture flourished on this far-away island. 

The Museum of London has an outstanding collection of evidence for the development of the Roman city and its people, displaying mosaics, coins and tombstones and conveying how new scientific techniques are expanding our understanding of this foundational era in London’s evolution.