Museums

London Mithraeum

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.

Best small museumsFree

Also in Sacred London and Monuments & Ruins.

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.

Where

12 Walbrook, EC4N 8AA

Nearest station

Cannon Street · 1 min walk

Step-free access

Hours

NearbyMuseums

• Mansion House1 min walk
• Bank of England Museum4 min walk
• Guildhall Art Gallery4 min walk

NearbyOther Categories

• St Stephen WalbrookSacred London1 min walk
• London StoneMonuments & Ruins2 min walk
• Crosstown Cannon StreetDesserts & Gelato2 min walk

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