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 Wall in the car park

Eleven metres of Roman wall standing in an underground car park, between the bays and the bins.

The wallFree

Also in Monuments & Ruins.

Five metres below the road, against the back wall of a car park, stands a piece of the Roman city wall: Kentish ragstone banded with courses of Roman tile, three and a half metres of it above a sandstone plinth that sits level with the tarmac. The inner face is intact - the triple tile course at the base, then the doubles above, then the ragstone between - and the outer face has been robbed away to the rubble core, which is its own kind of cross-section.

It is what is left of sixty-four metres uncovered in 1957 when the site was being cleared for the new road. Almost all of it was knocked down to build that road and this car park; these eleven metres were kept deliberately, as a particularly fine piece, and the car park was built around them. The wall itself went up between about AD 190 and AD 225, ran from Tower Hill to Blackfriars and decided the shape of London for the next thousand years.

Where
London Wall Car Park, London Wall, EC2Y 9DT
Nearest station
Moorgate · 2 min walk

Down in the car park, free, and there whenever the car park is open.

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Photo by Jamzze, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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

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