Roman London

Explore Londinium, established around AD 50. A guide to the ancient city, and listings of things you can still see and visit today. Remnants of the city walls, the amphitheatre only discovered in 1988, and a timber from the waterfront where the first London Bridge came ashore.

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The Bastions at the Barbican

Medieval bastions on the Roman line, standing in the Barbican's ornamental lake.

The wallFree

Also in Monuments & Ruins.

Three bastions and the wall between them survive along the south side of the Barbican estate, beside St Giles Cripplegate. The wall is Roman at the base and the bastions are thirteenth-century, hollow-backed towers added when the city was fortified against Simon de Montfort's barons. The estate's architects kept them and ran the water round their feet, so Bastion 12 rises out of a lake among the concrete. No other stretch of the wall is seen like this. The panels along the walkway explain each piece.

Where
St Giles' Terrace, Barbican, EC2Y 8DA
Nearest station
Barbican · 4 min walk

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Photo by Doyle of London, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL.

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