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Recovering Roman London

Antiquarian beginnings

Almost everything we know about Roman London is known through archaeological research. Only fourteen ancient texts mention the city, offering a thin and unreliable framework. ¹ All are secondary sources written far from the events they describe and biased towards particular themes and audiences. None treated London as its subject. The first histories of London were not written until centuries later, crafted from folklore to claim ancient pedigree for England’s capital city. Many took inspiration from the twelfth-century writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth who credited Brutus, a descendent of Aeneas, with the foundation of a new Troy on the banks of the Thames. This appeal to Trojan ancestry set London on a par with ancient Rome, adding honour and majesty to its foundation. ² By the end of the sixteenth century, however, these semi-mythical accounts were being questioned by antiquarians whose scholarship preferred primary sources, establishing the intellectual foundations of modern study.

Late Tudor London set itself at the epicentre of the political and intellectual ferment of the late renaissance, inspired by the rediscovery of Greek and Roman antiquity. ³ It was in these changed times that brickmakers digging for clay on the outskirts of the City in ad 1576 came across a Roman cemetery. Their discovery resulted in John Stow’s publication of London’s first substantial archaeological report, describing burials in terms that still serve the needs of modern study. ⁴ Contemporary fashion involved collecting and displaying Roman antiquities: arranged to represent the world from which they were drawn in patterns that established the foundations of typological ordering. ⁵ One of the key Londoner’s of this questioning age was the philosopher statesman Francis Bacon, who served as Lord Chancellor under King James I. Bacon directed scholars to move beyond ancient teachings to seek new understanding through the inductive processes of observation and experiment. ⁶ This search for empirical knowledge drew on the logic of measurement and classification, and established the tools of evidence-based inquiry. The exhortation to record first and theorize later, still common in rescue archaeology, is a prescription derived from Bacon’s scientific method.

The exploration of London’s Roman past ceased to command attention during the troubled early seventeenth century, but was reinvigorated by discoveries made in rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1666. Sir Christopher Wren, Surveyor General and Principal Architect, developed a close interest in antiquarian study and made detailed studies of London’s Roman structures and deposits. ⁷ In following decades John Conyers, an apothecary from Fleet Street, recorded a Roman pottery kiln at St Paul’s Cathedral and recovered objects from the Fleet ditch during construction. John Woodward of Gresham College also assembled a collection of London finds, publishing an influential paper on antiquities found at the corner of Camomile Street and Bishopsgate. ⁸ After a spate of discoveries the pace slowed. Sufficient was known to inform early eighteenth-century surveys of London’s visible monuments, allowing William Stukeley to hazard the first known map of Roman London (Fig. 2.1). ⁹ Over the following century, central London saw few of the deep excavations that invited archaeological attention, although the sporadic discoveries and speculative observations of amateur collectors decorated the pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine.

Fig. 2.1 William Stukeley’s map of ‘Londinium Augusta’ drawn in 1722 (Stukeley 1776, Plate 57).

Victorian rebuilding

The nineteenth century was a different matter, during the course of which London’s population swelled from around two-thirds of a million to over six million. This rapid growth established the conditions for accidental archaeological discovery. In the summer of 1835 a letter to the Times confidently claimed that ‘a full description of all the Roman remains which have been brought to light in the city during the last 20 years would occupy a good sized volume’. ¹⁰ No such volume was written, but in 1826 the Guildhall Library Museum had already been established to display the antiquities found. ¹¹

Between 1830 and 1870, the City was transformed from being a place where people lived into the world’s leading financial centre. Shops and houses were replaced by banks, and some 80 per cent of the buildings standing in 1855 were replaced by 1901. The rebuilding of the Royal Exchange in 1838 set the tone for the grand architecture of the business district, and finds from the site furnished Roman antiquities for display in the new Museum. ¹² Insurance companies and banks adopted imposing Italianate offices equipped with basement strong rooms, boiler rooms and canteens dug deep into Roman archaeology. London’s infrastructure was similarly overhauled. After the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858 the Chief Engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, Joseph Bazalgette, started building London’s new sewer system, whilst major road improvements involved cutting new thoroughfares at Cannon Street and Queen Victoria Street.

These works involved an unprecedented amount of deep excavation and heralded London’s first great period of development-led archaeology. This took place in difficult circumstances. The Corporation of London was at forefront of modernizing efforts but cared little for archaeology. This instead became the obsession of Charles Roach Smith. Smith had arrived in London as a chemist’s apprentice in 1826, establishing his own business at Lothbury in 1834. Excavations for City improvements, including the approaches to the new London Bridge, brought Smith ‘face to face with circumstances destined to give tone and character to my future life. Of course I became at once a collector; and something more; I studied what I collected’. ¹³ He developed an impressive network of contacts, organizing young volunteers to observe operations, and paying workmen for the antiquities that they found. This energetic interference brought him into conflict with developers, fearing distraction and delay, and eventually with the Corporation of London itself.

Smith professed three main objectives: to understand how London began and grew, to build a museum collection worthy of the city, and to preserve London’s important ancient monuments. His approach to the recording and analysis of Roman finds, and evangelical approach to archaeological publication, contributed to the emerging methodological rigour of the discipline. ¹⁴ Smith did much to establish the essential practices of urban rescue archaeology, believing that the disconnected ‘facts’ won under accidental circumstances could be drawn on to map the Roman topography of London. His interest in using archaeological finds to study everyday life, and in the potential of zoological and botanical data, was precocious, and his embryonic Samian form and figure type series began the exercise of describing pottery typologies on which we still rely. He continued this work for nearly 30 years, forming an extensive collection that he sold to the British Museum in 1855 where it still forms the core of Romano-British displays. ¹⁵ After serving on the steering committee that established the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, Smith retired to the country in 1855.

Smith’s combative energies were irreplaceable, and the flow of discoveries slowed after his retirement. Public interest in the Roman past was, however, never greater. When a wonderfully preserved mosaic pavement was uncovered in Bucklersbury in 1869, more than 50,000 visitors came to see it in situ during a three-day temporary display (Fig. 2.2). It was subsequently lifted for permanent exhibition in the new home of the Guildhall Museum in Basinghall Street. ¹⁶ Other important investigations took place in the Walbrook valley where Colonel Lane-Fox, better known to archaeology as General Pitt-Rivers, recorded wooden piles during the construction of the Gooch and Cousins warehouse in 1866, and in John Price’s excavation of a bastion of London Wall in Camomile Street in 1876. ¹⁷ In 1880–2, the rebuilding of Leadenhall Market exposed the walls of what was later recognized to be the Roman forum basilica. The recording of these features by Henry Hodge working as an artist for John Price, included remarkable water-colour illustrations of the archaeological stratigraphy and careful scale plans of the basilica. ¹⁸

Fig. 2.2 The discovery of the mosaic pavement in Bucklersbury in 1869 as shown in the Illustrated London News (reproduced by kind permission of the Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans Picture Library).

Roman studies come of age

The early twentieth century was a formative period in Romano-British studies. With the British Empire ascendant, ancient Rome became a treasury from which imperial lessons were sought. ¹⁹ Britain’s provincial finds were an educational part of this legacy, illustrating a narrative of imperial accomplishment. The doyen of such studies was Francis Haverfield, generally regarded as the founder of Romano-British archaeology as an academic discipline. Taking inspiration from the German scholar Theodor Mommsen, Haverfield wanted to know how Britons came to adopt Roman ways. ²⁰ This study of the ‘Romanization’ of Britain, backed by public interest in Roman history and archaeology, gave impetus to academic work. In 1909, this resulted in the publication of the first detailed study of the Roman city and its surroundings, at which time there were about 300 discoveries to report. ²¹ Shortly afterwards, in February 1910, the hulk of a Roman ship was found during the construction of County Hall near the present site of the London Eye. Once again public interest was awakened, and in grand showmanship the ship’s remains were carried to the new London Museum at Kensington Palace in a procession lead by the museum director riding on horseback. ²² Despite their popular appeal, public funds for rescue investigations remained scarce, encouraging Philip Norman to apply to the Goldsmiths’ Company and Corporation of London in 1914 for a grant to work on their construction site opposite Goldsmiths’ Hall, in one of the earliest known instances of developer funded investigation. ²³ Despite these sporadic successes, Walter Godfrey of the Society of Antiquaries wrote in 1926 that ‘it is common knowledge that…no reliable expert has been available to watch the excavations that proceed daily in the City in the various building reconstructions…the whole strata recording Roman and Medieval London are destroyed and the absence of detailed observations is a calamity’. ²⁴

These words were written to support Mortimer Wheeler’s appointment as Director of the London Museum. As soon as he was in post, Wheeler applied his whirlwind energies to the problems of Roman London. This resulted in a major new history and a catalogue of Romano-British objects held by the Museum. ²⁵ These works established lines of argument that flow through all more recent studies, and remain vital sources for our understanding of London. They were unashamedly products of their imperial age, presenting the Roman army as pioneers of civilization and Roman merchants as conveyors of ‘trade before the flag’. Wheeler’s grand ambitions for the London Museum conflicted with the Corporation of London’s backing of the Guildhall Museum, complicating arrangements for field research. ²⁶ The Society of Antiquaries, responding in part to pressure from Wheeler, provided funds for an Investigator of Building Excavations in London to watch city development sites from 1928 until 1937. This post was first held by Eric Birley, followed by Gerald Dunning and then Frank Cottrill. Their discoveries included the funerary monument of the procurator Classicianus (Fig. 9.7, p. 107), the identification of the Boudican and Hadrianic fire horizons, and the reconstruction of the plan of London’s forum basilica. ²⁷ By 1937, however, responsibility for observing city building sites reverted to a single officer at the Guildhall Museum, a post held by Adrian Oswald at the outbreak of the Second World War.

The ‘blitz’ of 1940–1 destroyed swathes of the City, prompting extensive post-war reconstruction. Sensitive to earlier failures, and in the progressive spirit of the age, the Roman and Mediaeval London Excavation Council was formed, funded largely by the Ministry of Works. A small permanent archaeological team commenced operations in earnest in 1947 under the direction of Peter Grimes, Wheeler’s successor at the London Museum. ²⁸ This was an exceptional research opportunity, since extensive bomb-site clearance made it possible to treat London as an open archaeological site rather than a living city, allowing for more purposive sampling strategies. The fieldwork was led by Audrey Williams and concentrated on areas that had not yet come under development pressure, leaving the monitoring of building sites to the continuing attentions of the Guildhall Museum in the person of Ivor Noel-Hume. A judicious programme of trial trenching, followed by large open-area excavations where results showed promise, brought reward. Grimes was proudest of his work on London’s urban defences, where he explored topographic peculiarities to identify a fort at Cripplegate pre-dating the city wall (below p. 240). His most famous discovery was the temple of Mithras, accidentally located during the excavation of a transect across the Walbrook valley at Bucklersbury House (Fig. 24.4, p. 318). The discovery of a marble head of Mithras on the last day of excavations, Sunday 18 September 1954, captured the attention of austerity Britain and drew an avalanche of press and public interest. A halt to the building programme was hastily agreed to let investigations continue, and a fortnight of public viewings arranged. On one day alone an estimated 35,000 visitors joined a mile-long queue to see the site. The campaign to preserve the temple resulted in an editorial in the Sunday Times and discussions within Prime Minister Churchill’s cabinet.

This public enthusiasm fostered the popularization of archaeology on television, whilst alerting developers to the perils of unexpected archaeological discovery. Studies of Roman London continue to benefit from both developments, even if they were slow to affect practice. The campaign to preserve the temple of Mithras resulted in a promise to lift and rebuild its remains. But the project was only completed in 1962, with scant regard to the archaeological detail and attracting limited public interest. A happier use of the temple remains waited on a later cycle of redevelopment, when they were reassembled to form a dynamic new display beneath the Bloomberg building in 2017. Whilst the City continued to receive the lion’s share of attention, Southwark to the south of the river was the subject of an important post-war programme of archaeological excavations under the direction of Kathleen Kenyon.

The post-war period saw several important changes in the conduct of archaeological research, in both London and other war-damaged cities. Field archaeological techniques were introduced to establish the correct stratigraphic context for all of the finds recovered, and this required closer oversight of excavation labour than had been possible on Victorian building sites. The recording exercise came to rely on the participation of a skilled workforce, drawing on the enthusiasms of students and volunteers whose involvement created a new route into archaeology. ²⁹ In 1963, however, the Roman and Mediaeval London Excavation Council ceased fieldwork, leaving Peter Marsden who had replaced Noel-Hume at the Guildhall Museum as the lone professional archaeologist working within the City. Marsden has described the following decade as a bad dream in which busy rebuilding caused untold damage to buried remains. ³⁰ In trying circumstances major discoveries were made at Huggin Hill (p. 141), Cannon Street (p. 137), and around the forum (p. 133). These investigations relied on teams of volunteers rushed onto site when building works could be interrupted at weekends and holidays, organized into local archaeology groups through the energies of Harvey Sheldon, Brian Philp, and Nick Fuentes.

Professional archaeology

Britain’s building boom of the 1960s, layered onto the destructions of the Second World War, damaged the historic fabric of many English cities. A strong political reaction, allied to the slowing pace of economic growth in the 1970s, brought conservation policies to the fore. Archaeology was a major beneficiary of these changes in attitude. Encouraged by the lobbying of the pressure group ‘Rescue’, public funds were directed towards the establishment of a series of full-time archaeological teams ready to intervene on building sites ahead of the bulldozer. ³¹ In London this resulted in the Corporation of London forming a dedicated Department of Urban Archaeology (DUA) within the Guildhall Museum (which merged with the London Museum to form the Museum of London). In its study ‘The future of London’s past’, ‘Rescue’ concluded that there would be little of Roman London left to study within 15–20 years, and recommended the creation of a seventy-four-strong team of staff. ³² Initially funded by the Department of the Environment, the DUA started work in December 1973, sending field archaeologists onto the vast majority of sites where remains were endangered. Most of the full-time excavators were graduates, but their main qualification for employment was fieldwork experience, usually gained through earlier voluntary involvement. This influx of diggers meant that archaeological research was increasingly treated as a technical skill, in which the practice of archaeology became its purpose. This professional attention arrived in time to address the consequences of the wholescale rebuilding of the Thames waterfront. The advent of containerization had rendered London’s port and warehouses obsolete, opening space for the expansion of the financial centre and prompting waterside works that exposed London’s buried Roman port. ³³ By 1978, staffing levels had risen to the levels originally recommended by ‘Rescue’. Although the City remained the main focus of attention, this network of professional coverage was extended throughout the Greater London area.

Despite these successes, public funds remained insufficient to meet the escalating demands of the work. The increased density of trained archaeologists digging in the City resulted in ever greater volumes of finds being recovered, generating an ever more complex body of documentation. The expectation grew that the most important findings might only emerge during post-excavation analysis, since there was too little time on site for notes to be compared or conclusions drawn, and finds were removed from site long before specialist study could be undertaken. The immediate consequence was to discourage selectivity of what to recover and record, for want of sufficient knowledge or courage to make the judgements required. A post-excavation backlog of unprocessed information grew, placing ever greater demands on the over-stretched resources of the DUA. These resource were, in any case, diminishing as pressure was brought to bear on public sector finances.

In London, there was a ready solution to hand. City developers had become accustomed to making time in their building programmes for archaeological attendances, and the planners of the Corporation of London and neighbouring Boroughs worked closely with their archaeological colleagues in the Museum of London to ensure that this was a near universal requirement. These delays were a significant cost and became difficult to contain. Memories of construction being halted by unexpected archaeological discovery, as at the temple of Mithras, haunted planners, architects and builders alike. Faced with many competing commitments publicly funded archaeologists can be slow to mobilize, and it made sense for developers to invest in speeding the progress of their works. The high value of city property, and the need to create space by digging deep—since it wasn’t possible to build upwards and obscure views of St Paul’s Cathedral—brought developer funding headlong into City archaeology at the close of the 1970s.

During the heady 1980s, London’s big-bang of deregulation and the needs of new technology resulted in the widespread replacement of London’s Victorian building stock with new offices and trading floors. The team of archaeologists working to clear the ground for these projects grew fast, and by 1990 the DUA employed nearly 350 professional staff, including around 200 fieldworkers working on City sites. ³⁴ This resulted in the recording of hundreds of archaeological sites threatened by destruction: fifty-four new excavations started in the City of London in 1988 alone. Distracted by the demands of this busy fieldwork schedule the programme of analysis and publication continued to lag behind. A small post-excavation team was set to work on the archives of excavations conducted before the advent of developer funding, aided by grants from the Department of the Environment (subsequently English Heritage). This work became a learning ground for better managing the complex flows of ill-digested information generated by the stratigraphic recording of the post-war years. These new skills also matched the expectations of commercial sponsors, anxious to secure a return on their expenditure on archaeology. As a consequence, the advances in archaeological field methodology were belatedly matched in areas of project management and analytical reporting.

The speculative building rush of the late 1980s resulted in a massive oversupply of new offices. City construction work juddered to a halt in 1991, leading to widespread redundancies amongst archaeologists working on building sites. This contraction also concentrated attention on structural problems in how resources were managed. Several programmes of post-excavation study were left incomplete as budgets were sucked into the vortex of organizational implosion, with the consequence that many important discoveries of the late 1980s and early 1990s remain unpublished to this day. The relationship between developers and archaeologists was also put under pressure by high-profile disputes over the conservation of the remains exposed. A case in point was the 1989 investigation of the Roman baths at Huggin Hill. The redevelopment of this site was planned on the assumption that the funding of professional archaeological attendances would allow the site to be cleared, creating space for new basements where plant rooms could be housed. Inconveniently, if not unexpectedly, the excavations exposed a wonderfully preserved Roman bathhouse whose walls survived up to 3 metres high. Since these formed part of a scheduled ancient monument their preservation could be insisted on, leaving the developer, Hammersons, with an obligation to bury the remains and redesign their building. The outcome satisfied no one: the bathhouse was reburied, remaining wholly inaccessible, massive costs were incurred in the redesign of the new offices, and the results were never properly published. ³⁵ Similar problems emerged in the wake of the developer-funded investigations of The Rose, an Elizabethan theatre on the south-bank. Here the public outcry matched the excitement of the discovery of the Temple of Mithras. The weight of these episodes of conflict contributed to an overdue reform of how archaeological remains were addressed in the planning process. New guidance published in November 1990 established a framework of dialogue between developer, archaeologist and planner aimed at better identifying problems through fact-finding and avoiding conflict through informed consultation. ³⁶ Conservation goals were set at the heart of the investigative process, although it was recognized that the professional recovery of finds and records might sometimes mitigate destruction if it advanced understanding. In London, English Heritage was identified as a source of planning advice on these archaeological matters. At the same time, the Museum of London reformed its fieldwork teams, in the wake of the 1990 slump, and new commercial procurement practices resulted in other archaeological teams being recruited by developers to work in London.

The opening-up of competitive tendering for fieldwork commissions relied on the establishment of a regulatory regime to manage conflicts of interest and counter the perceived risk of a cost-cutting decline in quality. This involved giving emphasis to the quality of the research design and to standardizing practice. This has helped to ensure that a growing proportion of the work results in the publication of comprehensive specialist reports. Over the last quarter of a century all proposed building programmes have been assessed for their impact on buried archaeology, resulting in either the conservation or investigation of the Roman remains. This has been underpinned by carefully programmed research-orientated sampling strategies, implemented by professional teams drawing on budgets sufficient to result in publications that add to our understanding of Roman London.

More than 500 separate investigations of Roman remains were undertaken in London in the quarter-century following the publication of the planning policy guidance on archaeology in 1990. ³⁷ It is not easy to make sense of the Roman city from this body of work. These studies explored small fragments of the archaeological landscape and published output is dominated by site-specific accounts. The Museum of London alone has published nearly 100 reports on its excavation of Roman sites since 1997. The chief object of this reporting is to present sufficiently comprehensive scientific descriptions to compensate for the destruction of the physical evidence: an exercise misleadingly known as ‘preservation by record’. These are consequently works of dense descriptive detail written for narrow specialist audiences. Even more information sits in unpublished archives, and nearly two-thirds of the important excavations of Roman London undertaken in the last quarter-century have yet to be published. Much of this material can be consulted at the Museum of London’s Archaeological Archive, but its complexity and inaccessibility makes it an under-utilized resource.

The pace of new development within the City slowed significantly after the financial crisis of 2008, offset in part by railway schemes such as Thameslink and Crossrail, and ground to a halt with the uncertainties of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time of writing, there are few prospects of large-scale investigations within the Roman town. Several programmes of post-excavation analysis remain ongoing but we are witnessing the end of an era of exploration, making it an appropriate moment to take stock. The intensity of archaeological research makes London one of the best-studied Roman cities, but its potential to contribute to our understanding of the ancient world remains incompletely realized. There is an enormous amount of new information to explore, but before doing so we need to give thought to its nature and the avenues of research that it serves.