Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
diamondgeezer.blogspot.com
diamondgeezer.blogspot.com
London's original wall was 2 miles long, 6 metres high and almost 3 metres thick at its base
that states it ran from the Tower of London to the Museum in the Barbican.
>The London Wall Walk follows the original line of the City Wall for much of its length, from the royal fortress of the Tower of London to the Museum of London, situated in the modern high-rise development of the Barbican. Between these two landmarks the Wall Walk passes surviving pieces of the Wall visible to the public and the sites of the gates now buried deep beneath the City streets. It also passes close to eight of the surviving forty-one City churches. The Walk is 134 miles (2.8km) long and is marked by twenty-one panels which can be followed in either direction. Completion of the Walk will take between one and two hours. Wheelchairs can reach most individual sites although access is difficult at some points.
Google Lens appears to have missed the point here.
Sorry, this is suggesting I can walk over a hundred miles in 1-2 hours???
A friend lucked into (there's literally a lottery for popular sites) tickets for the new site in Open House London 2024 and the window existed but wasn't really set up for tourists yet of course.
For context, this line is Thameslink, just south of Farringdon, on the east (heading south) side.
The Merrill Lynch Financial Centre also has a big chunk of Roman stuff in the basement - but there's no public access and no access to the walkway around the ruins even if you're an employee.
[1] https://www.thecityofldn.com/directory/londons-roman-amphith...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isca_Dumnoniorum [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exeter_city_walls
I think I have a blog/digital journal from around 2007 or so, but with HUGE gaps (years) where I lost interest.
Pretty incredible in its own right
In 1491 the point is made that the Inca believed that they had been beaten by superior gods and so they bowed out. But he doesn’t really talk about what happened to the Aztecs. You steal stone from structures you don’t care about anymore.
Didn’t Mexico see more intensive colonization? Settlers would care less about existing structures. Maybe the Spaniards built missions out of the wall.
Recent examples:
https://oldstructures.com/2025/10/24/not-quite-a-tunnel/ https://oldstructures.com/2025/10/21/relieved/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London
Title should probably read "the City of London" rather than "London".
Here is the US, the "city of Chicago" is the same as "Chicago".
Even though a large part of its inhabitants don't realize it has a port.
I like Fairfax, VA. It is surrounded by, but not part of, Fairfax County, VA. Despite this, it still serves as the county seat.
That has a cathedral too.
For the people that don't know the City of London history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Whittington_and_His_Cat
The UK does not require this layer of subdivision to exist, so it's not that there's a different county or set of counties covering the same area now but rather there is no county. This is a contrast to say the US system where AIUI there must be a county and in some cases that county doesn't really matter (e.g. New York County in New York City aka Manhattan) but it has to exist anyway.
City status is very different here, the Monarch (ie now Charlie) gets to decide what is or is not a city, but because that's arbitrary it also has very few consequences, it's a cosmetic basically, you can write "City" on some signs if you like, but if you feel like a small town you still feel like a small town, and if you already feel like a bustling city then having the word doesn't make a real difference.
There are other offenders, but the US and UK together are probably the main reason English no longer has concise but unambiguous way to refer to sovereign states
The latter part is true of exactly one US state (Hawaii), but otherwise false. They are called that because they are political bodies capable of international relations. The 13 founding states were British colonies; Florida, New Mexico and Texas were famously Mexican and/or Spanish colonies, and the western half of the continental states were French colonies (though largely unexplored by France, so only nominally held).
Texas was an independent republic from 1836 until US annexation at the end of 1845. Although Mexico did not recognize the independence of the Republic of Texas, numerous other countries did.
California is more of an edge-case. It was arguably an independent republic for a few weeks in 1846. And a similar story with Florida: the Republic of West Florida existed for a couple months in 1810. But both of these cases were basically small uprisings that weren't broadly recognized by other countries.
I think it does: the territory administered by the Greater London Authority; i.e. the 32 places called "London Borough of X", plus the City.
The Windy City does have a kind of "get out" in that people refer to the larger metro area as "Chicagoland" whereas London is still just London thirty miles out from the financial district.
Not really. It’s about the Roman wall. It happens to be both in Greater London and around the City.
> Title should probably read "the City of London" rather than "London".
There’s only one Roman city wall in London, it is not ambiguous.
Otherwise not a very good WeWork.
Plus the crypt of St Bride's has a Roman pavement to look at. Nice and quiet down there.
Unfortunately it didn't mention the section in that carpark! But I can attest that the section behind the Leonardo Royal Hotel is amazing. I also recommend the tower remains on the Barbican estate (and really, just wander around the Barbican for a while, it's a wild place in general).
Edit: or Asia and Russia and South America...
In fact, this wall drove their rent higher and eventually they closed.
(Forgive the sob story, but the barber was amazing, and they closed down + fired everyone with no notice to customers. I have not been able to track him down since!)
What?! That's huge. What happened?
Buried ships of San Francisco - https://www.nps.gov/safr/learn/historyculture/buried-ships-o...
https://www.baylightscharters.com/bay-lights-charters-blog/w...
> Delgado received his first big assignment back in 1978 while working for the National Park Service: excavating and studying the remains of the Niantic, one of the first whaling vessels that brought gold-seekers to the area. It had been discovered near the Transamerica Pyramid at the corner of Clay and Sansome streets. After being left behind during the Gold Rush, the ship had been repurposed to serve as a storeship, saloon, and hotel until its demise in an 1851 fire.
Consider that https://maps.app.goo.gl/tYjaESQXss2KhHXQA used to be sea level.
As mentioned else comment, things were torn down and that served as the foundation for the next building.
Historically cities were hit by floods and wars and new buildings were built on top of the foundations of old ones. We had an article about that church in Rome built over another roman church built over another roman church, etc. down to an old temple on a spring, or something like that.
My figure of 1 mm is about the compacted result of decaying and layering. It may vary a lot according to the configuration of the ground.
Or you can go on a virtual tour[3]
[1] https://www.basilicasanclemente.com/eng/
Walking around Chicago I often see houses where the front door is a couple of meters below street level because the house never moved its door to an upper story when the city was releveled.