Under Another Sky

by Charlotte Higgins

  From the Guildhall, I walked down Gresham Street to Bank. Here once stood what was arguably Sir John Soane’s masterpiece, the Bank of England. In the 1930s, it was drastically remodelled. This represented, according to Pevsner, the City’s most egregious architectural loss, Blitz notwithstanding. During the work, Roman mosaics were found nearly eight metres below the ground. One can be seen in the bank’s museum, and the other is viewable by appointment, preserved where it was discovered. I followed a uniformed attendant as she walked me through marble-floored corridors and down a great cantilevered staircase into the bowels of the building. I joked that we must be near the vaults – she inclined her head seriously, to suggest that that was indeed precisely where we were. The mosaic was right at the bottom of the staircase, a simple but attractive guilloche design with a labyrinthine border. I thought of poor Soane. In the museum were drawings of the bank being eviscerated during the pre-war rebuilding work. The curious paintings Soane commissioned from his pupil Joseph Michael Gandy, envisioning it as a classical ruin in some long-distant future, had been prophetic.

  I left the bank and crossed over to James Stirling’s postmodern ark of a building, 1 Poultry. When it was being built, in 1994, archaeologists found a writing tablet. The wax covering the ‘page’ of silver fir, preserved by the damp of the nearby Walbrook Stream, had nearly worn away, but the stylus had scratched through the wax, leaving faint marks on the wood. Dr Roger Tomlin, a papyrologist at the University of Oxford, was with difficulty able to decipher them. It was a legal document: a deed of sale for a slave called Fortunata (or ‘Lucky’), a woman of an obscure Gaulish tribe. She was being sold to Vegetus, ‘the slave of Montanus the slave of the August Emperor and sometime assistant slave of Secundus’. Montanus, in the service of the emperor, might have been a figure in the financial administration of the province. Roman slaves such as he – bureaucrats in the imperial service – could easily have owned slaves of their own. Fortunata was ‘guaranteed healthy, and warranted not to be liable to wander or run away’.

  I emerged from Poultry on to Queen Victoria Street. It was between these two roads that the Bucklersbury mosaic was revealed in 1869 – an endlessly sinuous combination of strict geometry and trailing, stylised foliage that is now on display in the Museum of London. A picture in the Illustrated London News of the time shows ladies and gentlemen, all crinolines and toppers, being shepherded by bobbies as they queued up to look at it. Until recently, you could see the London Mithraeum here too. When it was excavated in 1954, and identified as a temple by the archaeologist W. F. Grimes, ‘only a mild interest was taken’, recalled Ralph Merrifield in his 1968 book Roman London. It was the discovery of a delicately carved marble head of Mithras that changed everything. The ‘unveiling of an ancient mystery cult in the workaday world of the City seemed to touch a chord of imagination and romanticism’, he wrote. Sixty thousand people came to see the new discovery over three days. Public opinion wanted it preserved and displayed. But building work on the new Legal and General building, Bucklersbury House, was about to start, right on top of the excavations. To replan the arrangement of somewhat featureless, but essentially pleasing modernist slabs would have cost £300,000 – no small sum in 1950s austerity Britain. So the temple of Mithras was moved, wholesale (though not with great accuracy or precision) to the Queen Victoria Street side of the new building, where it sat for half a century in a forecourt between the blocks, a slightly gloomy and unexciting ruin: a rectangle of squat grey walls, apsidal at one end, all encased in concrete. It was quite hard to imagine it serving as the temple for a men’s mystery cult, its barrel-vaulted ceiling deliberately low, the room cavelike and dark, the benches lining its nave thickly packed with men enacting scenes of Persian-inspired ritual.

  Bucklersbury House is no longer there; it was pulled down in 2011. On my visit in the chill January of 2012, I was stopped short by the new gaping space, the unexpected view of sky and steeples. The Mithraeum was no longer to be seen. The life cycles of this constantly self-destroying, self-renewing city are shrinking: it is now the turn of the post-Blitz buildings to be flattened and replaced. Norman Foster is the architect for the next iteration of Bucklersbury House, this time to be called Walbrook Square. The Mithraeum is to be moved – again – and displayed in the new development.

  The fortunes of Londinium’s remains are inextricably linked with the economic fortunes of the City of London. When the property market sinks, Londinium is more likely to lie undisturbed. When it booms, the archaeologists move in, ahead of the builders. One day, Roy Stephenson, the head of archaeological collections at the Museum of London, took me to the museum’s store and study collection in Shoreditch: the home of the less glamorous, less attractive cousins of the objects on public display. Inside, it was dark and almost windowless. The occasional shaft of light illuminated researchers rustling about among the lines of shelving. You could find bricks here that had been charred by the Great Fire; but we turned to the Roman section. Here were 150,000 archive boxes containing the relics and shards of Roman London, stacked on ten kilometres of shelves. They were blandly labelled (‘bone’; ‘tile’) and arranged according to their year of discovery. You could read London’s boom and bust in these boxes. For overblown 1988, I counted twenty-two shelves of finds; for 1989, the year of the crash, fourteen; for recessionary 1990, six, for 1991, two and a half.

  Perhaps, though, I was being sentimental about Bucklersbury House. Londinium, no less than London, could be cavalier about the past. Romans inscribed their deaths and their reverence to the gods in stone, and we expect with that monumentality to come permanence. But Romans pulled down Roman monuments and did what they liked with them. Christopher Wren’s tombstone to Vivius Marcianus had been built into the Roman city wall at Ludgate. Another memorial sculpture in the Museum of London shows a man wearing a sword and cloak, holding a set of writing tablets – presumably a military man seconded into administrative work for the governor. His tomb was recycled into a tower wall at Camomile Street, up near Bishopsgate.

  The break-up and reuse of monuments has set numerous puzzles for antiquaries. Charles Roach Smith is one of the most intriguing figures in the history of Londinium’s rediscovery. He was a pharmacist who kept a shop on Lothbury, near the Bank of England. His chief delight was to range over the City’s building sites, picking up antiquities from the construction workers employed in building London’s sewers in the 1830s and 40s. It must have been a useful source of extra income for the navvies, some of whom must surely have developed an ‘eye’ for coins or Samian ware. His diaries show the level of his commitment: for his entry of 28 June 1838, he briefly noted that today was ‘the Coronation of Victoria’. But he was more interested in his visit to Leadenhall Street. ‘Fragments of Samian Pottery … were lying about and the men told me some good things had been found there,’ he wrote. ‘On my return found that in Bartholomew Lane a fine tessellated pavement had been found about 15 feet deep, and broken up by the workmen …’ He fought a long and difficult battle with the Corporation of London, condemning its indifference to the antique city that was being broken up so carelessly, without any attempts at preservation or even record-keeping. His diary entry for 13 December 1838 railed against ‘the great want of energy in the society in regard to their obtaining correct … information on discoveries made in various parts of the kingdom which … are too often suffered to remain unrecorded’. Londoners were so transfixed by the quotidian demands of profit and loss, he lamented in his 1859 book Illustrations of Roman London, that they were blind to their own history. In describing a portion of the Roman wall at Tower Hill, he adopted a typically mournful tone. ‘Although the wall was … saved from imminent destruction, it could not be preserved from the effects of the prevailing spirit of the day, which cannot recognise the utility of ancient monuments except in the ration of their applicability to the necessities of trade, and the common, practical purposes of life; and the wall is now a side wall for stables and out-houses, and, of course, is
hidden from public view.’

  There is still a length of wall at Tower Hill, and Roach Smith might be pleased to see that it is no longer crowded in by ‘stables and outhouses’, but stands in its own patch of garden, through which the City workers hurry on their way to the Tube. It was at Tower Hill, in 1852, that Roach Smith made one of his most significant discoveries: a tombstone built up into a bastion of the city wall. It is now in the British Museum. With it, he recalled in Illustrations of Roman London, were ‘a great number of broken cornices, shafts of columns, and foundation stones of a building or buildings of magnitude’. The slab was inscribed with the words ‘(D)IS MANIBUS FAB(I) ALPINI CLASSICIANI’. Interpreting fragmentary inscriptions can be a difficult business. The first part was all right: ‘dis manibus’ means ‘to the shades of the dead’, indicating that it was indeed a tombstone. The next bit looked easy enough, too: the genitive case of what was clearly a name. And not any name, but Classicianus – a figure actually mentioned by Tacitus in his Annals. Gaius Julius Alpinus Classicianus was the Gaulish procurator of the province of Britannia immediately after Boudica’s revolt – brought in to replace the hapless official who had fled in the thick of the violence.

  It must have been an extraordinary moment for Roach Smith when he recognised the name, enabling him to line up archaeological and historiographical evidence in a rare, and thus no doubt extremely satisfying, way. Perhaps it is just as well, then, that by 1928 – after a retirement writing treatises on pomology among his beloved Kentish orchards – he was long dead. For that year, R. G. Collingwood, one of the great historians of Roman Britain, as well as one of the most significant philosophers of his day, flattened Roach Smith’s hypothesis, writing that ‘Roach was obviously wrong to think of connecting [the figure in the inscription] with Julius Classicianus in Tacitus, Annals XIV, 38.’ He instead conjectured that the inscription might have something to do with the word ‘classis’, fleet – it could mean ‘Fabius Alpinus, formerly of the navy’. Perhaps he believed that the connection with Classicianus was simply too good to be true. So the matter rested until 1935, when the missing chunk of the monument was found during the construction of an electricity substation, also at Tower Hill. The extra jigsaw piece added the crucial words ‘procurator of the province of Britain’, and the information that his wife Julia Pacata Indiana, a Gaul from an important tribe, had erected the tomb in his honour. Roach Smith had been right after all.

  From the Mithraeum, I turned to walk down Walbrook and reached Cannon Street, where I found the object known as the London Stone, set into the facade of a boarded-up 1960s office block. Underneath the modern railway station, on the other side of the road, impressive Roman buildings once stood, perhaps offices for the provincial or city administration. One theory, first propounded by Wren, is that the London Stone is a remnant of these buildings. At any rate, it is an object to which many myths cling (such as the fantasy that it was a Druid’s sacrificial altar, as in Blake’s ‘They groan’d aloud on London Stone’; or even that it is the boulder into which King Arthur’s sword was once plunged). Camden thought it might have been a Roman milestone, marking distances to other parts of the province, ‘considering it is in the very mids of the City’. In the nineteenth century, it was moved from an inconvenient spot in the middle of Cannon Street into the wall of Wren’s St Swithin’s Church. And when St Swithin’s went in the Blitz, the stone was moved again to its new home. When I visited it, it was surrounded in its niche by fag ends and discarded train tickets, and what seemed to be grains of wheat and a couple of almonds (as if in obscure offering). It was awaiting more glamorous quarters: there were plans to display it with the Mithraeum in the new Walbrook Square building, though what sense anyone would make of this obscure chunk of rock, I couldn’t tell.

  At any rate, I felt self-conscious as I squatted in the street to examine the London Stone, and so I continued along Cannon Street and turned left up Gracechurch Street, which, as it becomes Bishopsgate, then Shoreditch High Street, and then Kingsland Road, is really the beginning of Ermine Street, which would take you all the way to York if you kept going. But more immediately, Londinium’s forum stood exactly in my path. The point where Fenchurch Street crosses Gracechurch Street marks, more or less, the southern edge of Londinium’s forum; the crossing with Cornhill its northern boundary. It was vast: 170 square metres (each side just short of the length of St Paul’s). A three-storey basilica, holding law courts and the city’s senate, ran the length of the forum’s north side. It was the biggest building this side of the Alps: its nave was 100 metres long. It is shiveringly hard to conceive of anything so grandiloquent in this patch of the city, even as Richard Rogers’s Lloyd’s building looms down, just beyond the old forum’s north-east corner. Now, the only thing that can be seen of it is in the basement of Nicholson & Griffin, a barber’s at 90 Leadenhall. When I visited, the place was deserted but for a group of cheerful hairdressers folding towels. One of them was on the phone discussing hair dye. Another moved a few handbags so that I could sidle up to a glazed wall, through which I squinted to see one of the pier bases of the old basilica. It was hard to make anything of it: it was as if a cathedral had been reduced to a garden wall.

  I headed down to Lower Thames Street, the north side of which marks the Roman shoreline, though there’s another block to go before you reach the modern riverside. The Romans themselves started inadvertently to narrow the Thames. As they built up their wharves and revetments, the banks gradually silted up, moving the land outwards. A clue to the original whereabouts of the water’s edge is the sharp slope of the little street called St Mary-at-Hill – the top of the steep ancient riverbank. Nearby, under a 1980s office block called Centurion House, was excavated a timber wall and riverside warehouses with their wooden shuttering intact.

  On the corner of St Mary-at-Hill and Lower Thames Street is Centennium House, another City office block with a cod-classical name. In its southern frontage there is an unmarked opaque-glass sliding door. Here I met Jenny Hall, the now retired curator of Roman antiquities at the Museum of London. She unlocked it; behind was a second portal, more utilitarian, with signs forbidding smoking and warning of trip hazards. We stepped through and entered a kind of bunker with bare breeze blocks for walls and a large poster describing the necessary first aid after an injury to the eyes. There was a staircase leading downstairs. ‘Let’s make plenty of noise to scare away any other visitors,’ said Hall; it was a minute before I realised she meant rats. At the bottom, fluorescent strip lighting flickered into life and we saw London’s best-preserved Roman remains – the fragments of a luxurious waterfront villa and bathhouse. Hall said they were a miraculous survival – extraordinary that the builders who stumbled on them thought to preserve them, forty years before they were formally protected under the first Ancient Monuments Act of 1882.

  Hall showed me the walls of an east and north wing of a dwelling, and between them, a suite of baths. Its entranceway was flanked by two semicircular rooms for warm and hot bathing, with the little pilae stacks that give away the presence of underfloor heating. In one corner a portion of the floor itself survived: hefty terracotta tiles that might have been overlaid with an elegant mosaic. From the baths’ entrance, a few steps lead down to a frigidarium, or cold room. The house gave right on to the river; Hall said she believed it was either a luxurious private home, or an inn with bathing facilities for riverborne travellers. Despite their wonderful legibility and good state of preservation, these ruins are not open to public view, except on special open days organised by the Museum of London.

  The house was built in the late second century and the baths added in the third; but at some point later the north wing collapsed and became a waste ground, covered, said Hall, in brambles, and inhabited by frogs, mice and snails. The east wing and the baths continued in use; and over 200 coins dated AD 388 and later were discovered in the furnace room, as well as late Roman glass and an amphora from Palestine. These were the very dying years of Roman rule in
Britain: had the coins been hidden against future collection? Offered to some god? Already, by this time, great swathes of Londinium were abandoned. There is a strip of loam in the archaeological layers, which some scholars believe means this now-vacant land was cultivated, by its later Roman inhabitants, as market gardens. Others believe the land became waste ground, and simply gave in to rot and decay: grass, brambles, weeds and scrub making their final, inevitable conquest of the ruins. This layer of soil is called by archaeologists ‘dark earth’.

  After the end of Roman rule in AD 408, Londinium, it is thought, was completely abandoned. When, later in the century, Anglo-Saxon settlements sprang up, they were dotted around the edges of the city, not inside it, in what are now London suburbs: Croydon, Battersea, Tulse Hill, Kingston, Upper Norwood. The Saxons established a port where the Royal Opera House now stands: but that was away to the west. It was only 400 years later, in the late ninth century, that Alfred the Great moved into the old city and made it his capital, taking advantage of its still-standing walls as a defence against the Vikings.