Beginnings of Roman London discovered in office basement | Hacker News Reader

Beginnings of Roman London discovered in office basement

bbc.com

140 pointspetethomas32 comments

This is not unusual in this district of London.

The remains of London’s Roman amphitheatre are beneath Guildhall, in the basement of the public art gallery: https://www.thecityofldn.com/directory/londons-roman-amphith...

And in the basement of Bloomberg’s London headquarters, there’s also a reconstructed Roman temple dedicated to Mithras. It's free and open to the public. Interestingly, after it was discovered, they dismantled it, moved it elsewhere, then later rebuilt it piece by piece: https://www.bloomberg.org/arts/advancing-the-arts-around-wor...

Finally, the Roman baths at Billingsgate are open to visitors on weekends: https://www.thecityofldn.com/directory/billingsgate-roman-ho...

This is not unusual in general…

My cottage in wales is built smack atop a roman road, and the garden follows the line of the agger. At some point it degraded so much that people started walking in the roadside ditch instead, which is now a holloway.

I have a friend in Bath who has an extremely fine Roman mosaic under his basement floor - found during construction a few centuries ago and they just left it in situ, put clay atop it and laid flags. He rediscovered it about 15 years ago when they pulled the flagstones up to put in a damp-proof course. Likely part of the baths complex as his house is a stones throw from them. Archaeologists documented it, and it was then buried under sand and a damp-proof course.

He’s still got damp down there.

It's Britain, fighting damp is like fighting the ocean: you can win a battle but you'll never win the war.

Yep, Roman ruins are all over the place. I cycle past a chunk of the old London Wall regularly. Lullingstone Villa in Kent was a cool school trip as a kid.

And then there's this little wall running across Cumbria/Northumbria...

I visited the Mithras temple the other day, and was pretty confused that they had moved it since the first time I had gone.

Actually they had moved it to where it was originally.

It was excavated then reconstructed by some 1950s office block.

I imagine Bloomberg either thought of this as a key feature, or it was part of planning consent for their head quarters.

Access is free, but it has been restricted to reduced crowding. When I’ve been there it seemed there seemed to be a Bloomberg employee tour on, I’m not sure how much access is controlled by Bloomberg, but it was a surprisingly long way down in the ground.

I’m not sure how much lower ground level was in Roman times.

IIRC temples to Mithras were almost always underground or in a cave.

I worked in that 1950s office block (Temple Court) and was involved in the sale of the site to Bloomberg.

The Temple of Mithras sat outside the office a few feet from the pavement with free public access at all times. It attracted very little interest though as there wasn't much to mark it out.

IIRC it had to be moved as part of the redevelopment and the idea to relocate to its original location were a very early part of the proposals. Not a big deal as part of a very large project and obviously a way for Bloomberg to gain favour with the City of London planners.

There are a few interesting videos on YouTube on the history e.g.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAEtYSJ4GLE

Appreciate the primary source insight!

Art installations are frequently moved.

Finding Roman archaeology isn't unusual, but from the story it sounds like what's unusual is how early the building is in Roman London's history, and how central it is to the earliest Roman settlement?

"Re-beginnings" would be more accurate.

Considering this building is dated to after Boudica's revolt [0] burned the city, the revolt itself having been caused by Nero/Rome ignoring a will by the nominally independent Celtic king Prasutagus leaving the area jointly to his wife/daughters and Nero upon his death.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudican_revolt#Londinium

I can see how when owning a building in a place like that, you might be tempted to say, "not even going to dig, don't want to know what we might find under there" that will cause your property to completely change value and control.

I wonder who takes the loss, in case suddenly your building can no longer be developed and is essentially state property (although owned by you).

I’m sure the property development mega corporation will get over it.

It's still your property. Through the "polluter pays" principle you (the developer) may have to pay for the archaeological dig (which is, by it's nature destructive).

In many cases if the archaeological finds are mobile (eg coins, shields etc) you may be compensated for them by a government fund.

But digging down in that part of London you're always going to hit something Tudor, Medieval, Saxon or Roman. It would be priced in as part of the development.

If we believe in markets, we would have to believe that the risk is priced into the cost of the property, much like the risk of a lemon is priced into the cost of a used car.

I wonder if you can get insurance for that. Also, how much worse must this be in Rome?

In another few hundred years, I wonder if people will discover bits and pieces of the buildings today and repeat the same cycle.

There should be an Augmented Reality app for London that shows you how it was around 1,800 years ago, whereever you are standing, mobile phone in hand.

On the top of the Shard, there is an AR telescope that shows you what is in some of the buildings of the cityscape, which is already very useful. Imagine something similar, but pointing to Roman times in "Londinum".

Did you get my email?

What is email? I find alley near market to squat and make toilet and bright light and person in dingy cloth and colorful noose ask me about email. KPIs. Ready for one on one. Last year I kill 15 barbarians I tell them. They look blank and ask if I complete performance review.

I worked next door to this building a while ago. London is constantly under construction, and in the Leadenhall area they are constantly finding Roman artifacts. The basement of my (terrible 1980s) building had a whole set of Roman bits and bobs embedded in the floor.

People from elsewhere says “how amazing” but it becomes a routine fact after a while. And while it is amazing it’s also a bit annoying. Major projects plan to block off a street for a month, which becomes three months or more once a Roman coin pile turns up.

As Sir Humphrey once said, the Civil Service has the engine of a lawnmower and the brakes of a Rolls Royce. I think this applies to the UK's construction industry and regulatory environment as well.

Crossrail cost about £280m per mile, which I'm pretty sure is a record.

HS2 is projected to be higher. I searched around and it’s very hard to compare, though. Boston’s Big Dig had an underground section of a mile or two but the larger project built something like 160 miles of highway.

I'm sure I've seen a sandstone culvert in an otherwise boring wall around the strand or Lincoln's Inn which is a Roman water supply. Can't find it on the wub, but.

It would be great use of my money, were I a billionaire, to build a vacuum-insulated sodaduct & cervisiaduct as a ring going around Europe perhaps with a monorail on the bottom (for convenient repairs) & photovoltaic cells on top to power it the monotail. Technically you can have two monorails for one track, one above and one below, so the upper monorail could be used for something else as well. The ice & carbon dioxide would be delivered separately to keep the the drinks fresh, and there would be few be a different pipe for drinks from different German & French & Spanish districts inside the cervisiaduct.

Fourier-pilled

Markov chains of fools

Different Fourier

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fourier

This is right next to Leadenhall Market, which dates from the 14th century. I wonder if there were other markets on the same-ish site between the Roman forum and Leadenhall.

I believe Leadenhall carried on being used as a market. I’m not sure about the 400s to 900s when the Anglo-Saxons clambered over Roman ruins.

The Vikings set up shop around The Strand and Covent Garden, then Alfred reinstated London.

I think, I am not historian, and maybe attributing much to recent TV shows. But I’ve worked through Queenhythe enough times to read the placards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queenhithe

I mean it's the BBC so they obviously have a focus on British history but you can find remains like that under many cities in Western and Southern Europe.

The story is about finding remains of a building that was constructed very early in the Roman settlement of London... That it's in London is very much the point of the story!

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