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.

The Wall Walk

The Roman city's edge, walked in an hour: two miles of it survive in pieces, and the pieces are all free.

2 miles, about an hourThe wallA walkFree

The face of the Roman wall at Tower Hill: rough grey ragstone blocks laid in rows, with courses of flat red tiles running through them — The tallest surviving stretch, beside Tower Hill station, where the walk starts.

Also in Monuments & Ruins.

The wall went up around AD 200, three kilometres of ragstone and red tile courses around Londinium, and the City's shape still follows it. This walk takes the surviving stretch from Tower Hill round to Aldersgate: the tallest standing section beside the statue of Trajan, the medieval arrow loops behind Cooper's Row, the bastion foundations under Vine Street, the fourteenth-century brick crenellations at St Alphage, and the corner of the earlier Cripplegate fort along Noble Street. Between them the wall is under the road, and the line of Wormwood Street and London Wall is the line of the wall itself. The City installed twenty-one tiled panels along the route in 1984 and around half remain.

Where: Tower Hill to Aldersgate, along the line of the Roman wall
Start: Tower Hill Gardens — Tower Hill
End: Aldersgate Street — St Paul's or Barbican

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Photo by Mx. Granger, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

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