Under Another Sky

by Charlotte Higgins

  Cowper’s poem is set just after Boudica’s flogging: she is ‘bleeding from the Roman rods’. She seeks counsel from a Druid, ‘sage beneath a spreading oak’, who foretells the destruction of Rome: ‘Rome shall perish – write that word/ In the blood that she has spilt.’ But at length,

  Other Romans shall arise,

  Heedless of a soldier’s name;

  Sounds, not arms, shall win the prize

  Harmony the path to fame.

  These ‘other Romans’, these Britons, are a progeny sprung ‘from the forests of our land’. As for Elgar and his Caractacus, it is the British woodlands that are the womb and nursery for this new people. They shall be greater than the Romans: ‘they shall a wider world command’.

  The poetic model for this Druidic foretelling is the prophecy of Rome’s future greatness in Virgil’s Aeneid – just as it is for the final chorus of Elgar’s Caractacus. In the sixth book of the Aeneid, the hero – Aeneas, another warrior from the deep past on the losing side, fleeing Troy after its sack by the Greeks – descends to the Underworld. Here he encounters his father, Anchises, among the shades of the dead. Anchises maps out the future for Aeneas’s descendants, right up to Virgil’s present. A great city will be founded; a great empire will grow. ‘Remember,’ says Anchises, ‘it is for you to rule over nations with your power. These will be your arts, to impose law on peace, to spare the conquered and to war down the proud.’

  The layering of time in the Virgil, and in the Cowper, and in the Cowper as recycled on to the Thornycroft sculpture, and in the Elgar– Acworth, seems to revolve in my mind. Magnificent destinies are foretold by poets and artists ventriloquising imagined figures from the deep past. The poems of great lost empires are plundered to make poems on great future empires. The stratified layers of time seem to have come loose, to have clashed and mingled. And these empires – the Roman, the British – have passed away.

  3

  London

  Tot campos, Sylvas, tot regia tecta, tot hortos

  Artifici destra excultos, tot vidimus arces,

  Ut nunc Ausonio Tamisis cum Tybride certet.

  (So many fields and pleasant woods, so many princely Bowres,

  And Palaces we saw besides, so many stately towres,

  So many gardens trimly dressed by curious hand which are,

  That now with Romane Tyberis the Tamis may well compare.)

  William Camden, 1607

  Very soon trees will be thrusting through the empty window sockets, the rose-bay and fennel blossoming within the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside them. Very soon the ruin will be enjungled, engulfed …

  Rose Macaulay, 1953

  Unlike Rome, where antique, medieval, Renaissance and modern buildings jostle each other, where past and present are in energetic, fractious conversation, Roman Londinium lies buried beneath modern London. The borders of Londinium still, more or less, mark the borders of the City of London, because the Roman walls became the medieval city’s boundaries, entered and exited by those long-perished portals that have a ghostly presence through their medieval names: Cripplegate, Newgate, Aldersgate, Bishopsgate, Aldgate, Ludgate. All these were Roman gates; only the seventh, Moorgate, was a medieval newcomer. The Thames – wider then than it is now – was crossed almost exactly where our London Bridge is, over to marshy, island-dotted Southwark with its mudflats and creeks, its gardens and baths and inns.

  Londinium lies between six and eight metres below London. In Naples, you can take tours to ‘Napoli Sotterranea’, underground Naples. You can climb down steps under a church, and be in the Roman streets. Or wander through the Greek city, older still, which was once the new city, the ‘nea polis’. You cannot ‘be’ in Londinium, though you can, if you are persistent, seek it out and glimpse it in the crypt of a church, in the cellar of a shop, in an underground car park, behind a locked door in an office basement. If Londinium is the city’s dark ancestral place, its unconscious, then it is, for the most part, occluded. It is in the City’s nature to prefer the bright, sunlit, angular surface of things, the hard edges of its supermodern architecture with its false promise of prosperity. Why would you want to go down there, to the dank, dark places of the imagination? To the past? The katabasis – the Greeks’ ‘going-down’, the descent to the Underworld, is a dangerous journey. You might not return with what you set out to find.

  Londinium was probably a Roman creation, built at the first bridgeable part of the Thames that could also be used as a port, in the years following Claudius’s conquest. The Romans were punctilious about assigning different categories to towns, depending on their administrative functions. No one knows for sure precisely what category Londinium was, but it became, de facto, the principal city of Britannia, ‘copia negotiatorum et commeatuum maxime celebre’, extremely famous for its many traders and goods, according to Tacitus. There are plenty of signs of life before the Romans – just no town, no great Iron Age settlement as at Colchester. In the British Museum there is, for example, an Iron Age artefact known as the ‘Battersea shield’, a shining sheet of bronze with whorls of raised decoration, studded with scarlet enamel. Like other ancient objects in the museum, the shield came from the Thames – perhaps because it was placed there, or flung there, to fulfil some unknown religious impulse. The waters are full of ancient things: in the long-ago culverted Walbrook Stream – whose course is marked by the street named for it, running from Bank to the Thames, and whose shores were lined with shrines and workshops in its Roman heyday – the archaeologist Augustus Pitt-Rivers found numerous human skulls in the late nineteenth century. He thought they might be the heads of Romans massacred by Boudica. In the twelfth century, Geoffrey of Monmouth seemed to know about the heads: he fashioned a tale about a Roman legion whose soldiers were decapitated by a besieging British army, their heads flung into a stream called by the Saxons ‘Galobroc’. Archaeologists now speculate they were placed there by Britons for some ritual purpose. For Geoffrey, London was the town founded by Brutus: it was Troynovant, or Trinovantum, the new Troy – later to be renamed Lud’s Town, and so London.

  The first notable event in the history of Londinium was its destruction. The name of the city first appears on the page in Tacitus’s account of the rebellion of Boudica. There is a line of black in the archaeological layers that is said to be the charred matter from her flaming of the fledgling city. That was the first great fire of London. The second – another layer of black – came in about AD 120. The third was in 1666. The fourth, 1940–1, was the Blitz.

  For centuries, people have speculated about where Suetonius Paulinus finally defeated Boudica, after he took the tactical decision to abandon Londinium. There is no evidence; but there has always been plenty of fantasy. John Nelson, in his 1811 history of the parish of St Mary, Islington, wrote that Battle Bridge – now called King’s Cross – ‘is supposed to have been so called from its contiguity to the spot where the celebrated battle was fought’. He added: ‘The opinion that the scene of this dreadful conflict was not far distant from this spot, is further strengthened, by some considerable remains of an encampment, which may yet be seen in the neighbourhood, and which exhibits sufficient evidence that the situation was an important military post.’ Nelson’s ‘Roman camp’ was in Reed Moat Field, which became Barnsbury Square a decade or so later when the area was developed.

  I live within sight of the square. It is no longer thought to be an old Roman camp, but rather the site of a moated medieval manor house. When I cycle to King’s Cross, to the office where I work, or to the British Library, I follow this mythical route of Suetonius Paulinus. I pass through the ‘camp’, and as I speed down the long hill of Copenhagen Street, I pass a turning to Boadicea Street. In the office, I sit at a desk overlooking a canal basin that remembers the old name for King’s Cross: Battle Bridge Basin. There is a persistent myth that Boudica is buried beneath platform eight of King’s Cross railway station. None of this has the least foundation, but I enjoy the accretion of story �
� like a thickening in the air. In the early nineteenth century, industrial, filthy Battle Bridge was notorious as a haunt of low-lifes and criminals. And so, when the area was redeveloped in 1830, in an attempt to banish all the unpleasant associations of the past it was renamed King’s Cross, after ‘a ridiculous octagonal structure crowned by an absurd statue of George IV’, according to Walter Thornbury’s 1878 history, Old and New London. That structure – which at various times contained a police station and a public house – was pulled down in 1845, and so there is no longer a king’s cross at King’s Cross. I prefer one of the other names that was mooted in 1830 and discarded: Boadicea’s Cross.

  If Londinium was burned almost at its birth, it now reveals itself only through London’s destruction. When Christopher Wren set to work remodelling the City – which had been rendered, as he put it, a ‘great Plain of Ashes and ruins’ by the 1666 fire – he found a number of Roman remains, including ‘the most remarkable Roman Urns, Lamps, Lacrymatories and Fragments of Sacrificing-vessels, &c’ near Cheapside. When he was working near Ludgate, a tombstone set up to one Vivius Marcianus by his wife Januaria Martina was dug up: it can now be seen in the Museum of London. On the site of St Paul’s, according to his son’s memoir, Wren found ‘to his Surprise … a Roman Causeway of rough Stone … He concluded then to lay the Foundation of the Tower upon the very Roman Causeway, as most proper to bear what he had design’d, a weighty and lofty Structure’. He searched in vain for the temple to Diana, or Apollo, that reputedly lay beneath the burned-out ruins of the old St Paul’s. ‘Having rummaged all the Ground thereabouts, and being very desirous to find some Footsteps of such a Temple, I could not discover any,’ he wrote.

  Wren wanted to build a rational city, in spirit like the regularly gridded Londinium: he envisaged a central piazza radiating streets like a sunburst, with the Exchange at its centre, ‘the Building to be contriv’d after the Form of the Roman Forum, with double Porticos’. But he was thwarted by ‘the obstinate Averseness of a great Part of the Citizens to alter their old Properties’. Not for the first time, London resisted rationalisation: no new Rome was to be built here. Even on Roman Londinium’s grid, laid out with sergeant-majorish precision, archaeologists have found the foundations of British roundhouses. Not everyone, it seems, wanted flat-fronted. As Nikolaus Pevsner wrote in his 1957 architectural guide to the cities of London and Westminster, the City’s keynotes were, and remain, ‘ever-recurring contrasts of tall and low, of large and small, of wide and narrow, of straight and crooked, the closes and retreats and odd leafy corners’. At least the improving Wren was allowed to build St Paul’s, he said, ‘after a good Roman manner’.

  There is a map of Londinium, published by the Museum of London. The Roman city’s streets and buildings are all marked, as far as they are known, which is incompletely. Roman towns are predictable. From Spain to Syria they came with a more or less full complement of forum, basilica, baths, amphitheatre, theatre. When Londinium’s amphitheatre was discovered under the Guildhall in 1988, the surprise was that it had been located, not that Londinium turned out to have had one. On the map of Londinium there are large gaps. But you can be sure there are Roman things in these lacunae, perhaps tunnelled through by sewers or Tube lines, or crushed out of existence by London’s foundations, rooting down. Or perhaps still intact, waiting to be discovered by some fracture of the city’s surface. On the museum’s map, Londinium is shown in solid black lines. It is modern London that is rendered as a faint grey shadow, behind. Looking at it, I have the impression that the Roman city has risen up to the surface and engulfed our own.

  I started out at the museum. My reading of the map was complicated further by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s post-war architecture for the Barbican, in the purlieus of which the museum stands. The architects’ vision was for a multi-level city, with gardens and walkways that ran above the streets. So I was now hovering on a raised path – Bastion Highwalk – above both London and Londinium. From here, I could see the line of the Roman city wall marked by the medieval brick bastions in the gardens below the Barbican. And on the other side of the Highwalk, I could see, marching down Noble Street, craned over by post-war blocks, the Roman wall itself – or, rather, a medieval wall that is Roman at its base. It was revealed when a great slice of the city, from here down to the Thames and east of St Paul’s, was destroyed by the bombs of the Blitz. In her memoir, Jacaranda, Oleander, the novelist Penelope Lively recalled a happy childhood in Egypt that came to an end with the war and a return to England. One day a family friend took her to see the blitzed City. ‘The effect was not one of destruction but of tranquil decay, like some ruined site of antiquity,’ she wrote. I imagine them looking at their map, wondering at how little it resembled what they saw in front of them; like my plan of Londinium, it was a map of the past. Then he showed her a bastion of the Roman wall. She was amazed: she knew about the Romans, they were in Egypt, but ‘how could there be Romans right up here, in England?’ All of a sudden, she wrote, ‘amid the wreckage of London and the seething spires of willowherb’, there seemed to be a ‘sense of relevances and connections which were mysterious, intriguing and could perhaps be exposed’. The City’s deconstruction, the revelation of its secret parts, became a personal metaphor: ‘It was as though the exposure of the chunk of wall had also shown up concealed possibilities. I sniffed the liberations of maturity, and grew up a little more …’

  She was not the only writer to be struck by London’s appearance of antique decay after the Blitz. Rose Macaulay, in a postscript to her 1953 book The Pleasure of Ruins, wrote vividly of ‘the new ruins’, summoning up ‘the lane of tangled briars that was a street of warehouses’; the ‘jungled caverns’ where ‘stood a large tailor’s shop … Tomorrow or tonight, the gazers feel, their own dwelling may be even as this.’ The fronds and branches of untameable vegetation are simply waiting their chance, biding their time: they will take over, in the end.

  I went down to street level, opposite the glass-and-steel of 88 Wood Street, a Richard Rogers building, which, with its blue-and-red funnels emerging from the pavement in front of it, resembled an ocean liner. Following a sign to the Museum of London’s goods entrance, I descended a ramp, which took me below street level, to the medieval bastions. Here was the entrance to an underground car park, where there is another chunk of the Roman wall, exposed during the bombing and preserved by the Corporation of London. As I entered, the attendant gazed at me glassily, as if, like Charon, he expected a coin. The chunk of wall is parked in bay 52, next to the motorbikes and scooters, past the BMWs and the Mercs of the City workers. It stands two and a half metres tall, and is thickly made from Kentish ragstone, sliced through with three layers of tile courses. I was beset by the headachey smell of old petrol. Every few seconds came a sound as of a blasting wind: a heavy vehicle passing overhead. I ascended gratefully, not looking back. By the entrance, through a forbidding metal door marked ‘Private’, there are the remains of an early-second-century fort gate. Once in a while, the Museum of London organises viewings. Otherwise, you would never know it was there.

  I climbed back up on to the Highwalk and this time went on into St Alphage Gardens: a knot garden of bloomless wintry roses and beeches bristling with dead foliage. This – one of Pevsner’s ‘odd leafy corners’ – had been created by the bombs, and through it runs another chunk of the wall. You can read its history in the stone and brick: it is Roman at the base and medieval at the top, the brick battlements built when it was restored during the Wars of the Roses. Behind are the ruins of the medieval tower of St Alphage Church, bombed. To read the 1957 London Pevsner is to read a war memorial (restrained, taxonomical) for the city churches. St Alban, Wood Street: ‘a grievous war loss’. St Augustine, Watling Street: ‘The graceful lead spire of 1695 is destroyed.’ St Lawrence Jewry: ‘burnt out. The glorious woodwork is all perished.’ St Nicholas Cole Abbey: ‘Burnt out and now standing surrounded by devastation.’ St Swithin, Cannon Street: ‘burnt out’. Dutch Chur
ch: ‘destroyed by a direct hit’. Many of the losses were Wren churches. The City of London had been reduced once more to a ‘great Plain of Ashes and ruins’. Later, in the British Library, I leafed through a Corporation of London report produced just after the war. There was page after page of photographs of the shattered city. Sometimes a lonely classical column, perhaps from one of Wren’s churches, still stood amid the rubble.

  I descended from the heights and entered the yard of the Guildhall, the headquarters of the Corporation of London. In the paving on the ground was picked out a wide circle in dark-coloured tiles. It marked the outline of the ancient amphitheatre, which was discovered when the Guildhall Art Gallery was being built to replace its bombed predecessor. Go into the art gallery and head downstairs, beneath the Rossettis, the Alma Tademas, and the bronze head of the young Prince Charles, and you can enter the east gate of the amphitheatre, with its walls still there – low, but legible. It was built around AD 70: a timber drain was dated using the technique of dendrochronology, in which tree rings are counted to determine the precise year the tree was felled. It was rebuilt in stone about AD 120, perhaps to coincide with the visit of the architecture- and engineering-loving Emperor Hadrian to Britannia. The stone amphitheatre was embellished with Egyptian marble, its walls lined with painted plaster. The excavators found the traces of what could have been trapdoors, lifted to let animals into the arena – perhaps wolves, bears or boars. In the amphitheatre’s drains were excavated a gold-and-pearl necklace clasp, coins, a hairpin: the curious archaeological business of finding lost property that has outlived its owners by millennia. One day I watched modern performers re-enact gladiatorial games in the Guildhall yard. It was skilfully done, and jovial: the master of ceremonies threatened to drag into the arena anyone whose mobile phone rang. We in the audience gamely spread our hands wide to indicate mercy, or clenched our fists and extended our thumbs to communicate ‘death’ (a system regarded as more historically authentic than the Hollywood thumbs-up, thumbs-down routine). The fighter I liked the best called herself Achillea: in real life she was an art and design teacher in a secondary school. She found beating her husband in single combat, she told me, ‘a great stress-buster’.