Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
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Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
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Re: Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
#2The Museum of London site (now closed as they prepare to move to their new site, coincidentally near the AWS HQ), and there was a window you could look down on part of the wall, which you can also see from the other side of the road near Barbican. I won't give directions, as that seems futile anywhere near Barbican, but I had only just thought about how weird it is that there is wall at Tower Hill, and wall at Barbican - they can't be the same run of wall as it was built, can they? That'd be immense...
Re: Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
#3Architectural Digest has a good video of the Roman Wall and other Ancient Roman history in london: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_-JnvuAeVI
Re: Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
#4Not bad engineering to make it through a handful of civil wars, a Blitz, and a couple thousand V-1 rockets mostly intact. You have to wonder how long all the steel and concrete that's been laid around the Thames from our civilization will last.
Re: Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
#5> ground level then was a few metres lower than now
What?! That's huge. What happened?
Re: Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
#6The Museum of London site (now closed as they prepare to move to their new site, coincidentally near the AWS HQ), and there was a window you could look down on part of the wall, which you can also see from the other side of the road near Barbican. I won't give directions, as that seems futile anywhere near Barbican, but I had only just thought about how weird it is that there is wall at Tower Hill, and wall at Barbic…
From the article:
London's original wall was 2 miles long, 6 metres high and almost 3 metres thick at its base
that states it ran from the Tower of London to the Museum in the Barbican.
Re: Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
#7For more of this sort of thing, check out the Old Structures Engineering blog. Don does a post a day, day in, day out -- so obviously some are more detailed than others. I enjoy having it in my feed.
Recent examples:
https://oldstructures.com/2025/10/24/not-quite-a-tunnel/ https://oldstructures.com/2025/10/21/relieved/
Re: Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
#8> ground level then was a few metres lower than now What?! That's huge. What happened?
Before industrial demolition was common, old buildings would be town down and material repurposed for new constructions, build on top of existing foundations and rubble. Do this enough over the centuries and your city will slowly rise in height.
Re: Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
#9> ground level then was a few metres lower than now What?! That's huge. What happened?
Every time a building fell apart due to earthquake, fire, flood, war, abandonment- the good material was taken for reuse and the bad material became rubble which was often smoothed out and used as a foundation.
Re: Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
#10For another interesting mix of new and ancient, check out the Serdica metro station in Sofia, Bulgaria. [0] It's fully inside an excavated Roman-era ruin. Very cool!