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Not every statue in London. The ones worth crossing the road for: Roman wall, medieval ruins, and the monuments that earn a detour.
The Roman temple of Mithras, found in 1954 and put back where it stood seven metres under Bloomberg's building, staged in sound and haze, free.
RomanRuinsGo insideFree
Also in Museums and Sacred London.
In September 1954, on a bomb site beside the buried Walbrook stream, the archaeologist W.F. Grimes uncovered a small Roman temple with a marble head of Mithras in it, the soldiers' god who killed the bull, and the queues to see it stretched down Queen Victoria Street; the developers were made to keep it, and did so by dismantling it and rebuilding the stones on a podium up the road, in the wrong place and with the wrong mortar. Bloomberg, buying the site for its European headquarters, undid that. In 2017 the temple went back to the spot where it was found, seven metres below the present street, and it is shown as a piece of theatre: the walls and altar in the dark, mist, a low chant, and light picking out the shape of the sanctuary as it might have been in AD 240. The find itself, the marble Mithras and his companions, is in the London Museum, but the room above the temple shows six hundred objects from the dig, among them the earliest dated handwritten document from Britain, a wooden tablet of 8 January AD 57. Entry is free on a timed ticket.
Step-free access
| Monday | Closed |
|---|---|
| Tuesday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
| Wednesday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
| Thursday | 10:00 – 20:00 |
| Friday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
| Saturday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
| Sunday | 12:00 – 17:00 |
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.