London Photo Gallery - Roman Relics

Beneath The City or tucked inside modern buildings are remnants of Roman-era London that can be visited for free. In collaboration with Urbanest, the City Wall at Vine Street is a free museum created as part of their redevelopment. It showcases a section of Roman wall and the foundation of a bastion tower previously hidden in the basement of an office building. The wall was completed around the late 2nd or early 3rd century when Londinium was the capital of Roman Britain. It circled the town for over 3km measuring 2-3m thick. It survived into medieval times when it was rebuilt, and as London grew, the walls became a part of the city. There is also plenty of evidence from after the Roman period, including glass bottles, clay pipes used to smoke tobacco, and other waste from the 17th century onwards. Elsewhere in the City, an ancient temple dedicated to Mithras, god of a mysterious cult that first appeared in Rome in the 1st century, sits underneath Bloomberg's Europe headquarters. Over 400 fragments of Roman writing tablets were unearthed here. The London Mithraeum uses multimedia technology to illustrate the site's history in a jazzy way.