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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Cripplegate Fort

The corner of a Roman fort that is older than the wall, laid open by the Blitz.

The wallThe fortFree

Left open since the bombing of 1940, and viewed from the walkway along the top.

Also in Monuments & Ruins.

The army built a fort here at Cripplegate in about AD 110, a stone barracks for the thousand or more soldiers who served the provincial governor, some ninety years before the city had a wall. When the wall came, in about AD 200, it was joined onto the fort's west and north sides, so along Noble Street the wall is double: the fort's thinner wall with the city wall thickening it on the outside, and at the south end the rounded internal turret of the fort's south-west corner. The wall itself took more than a million blocks of Kentish ragstone, shipped up the Thames in over 1,750 boatloads, and ran almost three kilometres from Blackfriars in the west to where the Tower of London now stands. All of it here stood under buildings until the bombing of 1940 cleared them, and it was left as a sunken garden, viewed from the walkway above.

Where
Noble Street, EC2V 7EE
Nearest station
St Paul's · 3 min walk

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Photo by Christine Matthews, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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

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