Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall

The 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...

Architectural Digest has a good video of the Roman Wall and other Ancient Roman history in london: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_-JnvuAeVI

Not 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.

> ground level then was a few metres lower than now

What?! That's huge. What happened?

From the article:

  London's original wall was 2 miles long, 6 metres high and almost 3 metres thick at its base

with a link to a graphic map and guide: https://colat.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/London-Wall-...

that states it ran from the Tower of London to the Museum in the Barbican.

For 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/

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.

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.

For 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!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdika_Metro_Station

Note this is about the City of London, an entity much smaller and older than the modern city known as London. It's land area is about 3 km^2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London

Title should probably read "the City of London" rather than "London".

The new Museum's site also has a very cool view through a window, but it's a view of the passing trains [underground], because historically that building (one of London's markets) had a freight service and of course there's no room to move a railway line under London so even though it hadn't needed a freight service for decades the passenger service over the same rails still exists and you will be able to wave to surprised (if they haven't taken that route before) passengers from inside the museum.

A friend lucked into (there's literally a lottery for popular sites) tickets for the new site in Open House London 2024 and the window existed but wasn't really set up for tourists yet of course.

Shoes. All the way down. ;-)

I worked for Lloyd’s Register for a spell, and their cafeteria was where the Vine Street building is, just got used to eating lunch there by the bits of wall everyday for a few years.

If anyone’s ever in Barcelona I recommend checking out the history museum, which is literally built on top of some Roman and medieval ruins. You can descend into the basement to see the excavated remains of the foundations of Roman buildings that had been levelled and built on top of.

Seattle: https://undergroundtour.com

Buried ships of San Francisco - https://www.nps.gov/safr/learn/historyculture/buried-ships-o...

https://www.baylightscharters.com/bay-lights-charters-blog/w...

> Delgado received his first big assignment back in 1978 while working for the National Park Service: excavating and studying the remains of the Niantic, one of the first whaling vessels that brought gold-seekers to the area. It had been discovered near the Transamerica Pyramid at the corner of Clay and Sansome streets. After being left behind during the Gold Rush, the ship had been repurposed to serve as a storeship, saloon, and hotel until its demise in an 1851 fire.

Consider that https://maps.app.goo.gl/tYjaESQXss2KhHXQA used to be sea level.

As mentioned else comment, things were torn down and that served as the foundation for the next building.

There's a Templar fortress in Lebanon that was occupied by militants a few years ago. 800 years old and still being used for its intended purpose.

I used to eat lunch at Bastion 14, although you can't get anywhere near it now. There was plenty of old wall at Moorgate that was very open access.

There is a London Wall Walk, starting at the Tower of London. Text copied from the plaques at the postern: (thanks Google Lens)

>The London Wall Walk follows the original line of the City Wall for much of its length, from the royal fortress of the Tower of London to the Museum of London, situated in the modern high-rise development of the Barbican. Between these two landmarks the Wall Walk passes surviving pieces of the Wall visible to the public and the sites of the gates now buried deep beneath the City streets. It also passes close to eight of the surviving forty-one City churches. The Walk is 134 miles (2.8km) long and is marked by twenty-one panels which can be followed in either direction. Completion of the Walk will take between one and two hours. Wheelchairs can reach most individual sites although access is difficult at some points.

> The Walk is 134 miles (2.8km)

Google Lens appears to have missed the point here.

I had a hard time remembering that distinction when I first read about the "City of London".

Here is the US, the "city of Chicago" is the same as "Chicago".

See also: The Loop

Takes me back. I don't think we have the number of shoe shops that used to dominate the high street and at the time I assumed inspired Adams.

That car park in image [4] is wild. The juxtaposition of a mundane parking garage built directly on top of ancient Roman ruins is incredible. It's a powerful reminder of the layers of history we're living on top of. Thanks for sharing.

New York is an obvious example of two entities of the same name, with the “City of” version being a small part of the larger version. It’s just on a much bigger scale.

New Orleans is a city, but City of New Orleans is a train

And the other terminus is Chicago, thus bringing us full circle. Line. Loop. Whatever.

If you leave ground alone all sort of things grow on it or lay on it. Dirt, mud, leaves etc. Soil grows at about 1 mm per year. 1 meter in 1000 years.

Historically cities were hit by floods and wars and new buildings were built on top of the foundations of old ones. We had an article about that church in Rome built over another roman church built over another roman church, etc. down to an old temple on a spring, or something like that.

For further confusion, ‘London’ does not exist at all as a well defined entity and the UK has no de jure capital.

It might even happen faster than that. If I don't sweep my cement patio for about a month, the decaying leaves from the bushes are enough to make about an 1/8th inch of fresh brown soil under the leaf piles.

> The Walk is 134 miles (2.8km) long and … Completion of the Walk will take between one and two hours

Sorry, this is suggesting I can walk over a hundred miles in 1-2 hours???

Most of the wall has been plundered for stone and to make way for new development over the past millennium. Its not conflict that has destroyed 2 miles of a 6m high 3m thick wall, it's peace :)

For even further confusion "London" actually contains two cities: London and Westminster. London was a walled city but Westminster was not. So "London" was we know it today is more like Westminster than London.

What is the exact job of the mayor of London then?

Buying and selling cats for profit, since 1423.

For the people that don't know the City of London history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Whittington_and_His_Cat

If you're in the vicinity of the road called London Wall (where the car park referenced in the article is) then it's only a short walk to London's Roman amphitheatre [1]. It doesn't seem to be very well known but is quite impressive. It's one of very many bits of Roman history entombed in basements of London buildings.

The Merrill Lynch Financial Centre also has a big chunk of Roman stuff in the basement - but there's no public access and no access to the walkway around the ruins even if you're an employee.

[1] https://www.thecityofldn.com/directory/londons-roman-amphith...

Exactly. This is hard to understand when living in a flat in a modern city but it's immediately clear in any other case.

My figure of 1 mm is about the compacted result of decaying and layering. It may vary a lot according to the configuration of the ground.

> Note this is about the City of London

Not really. It’s about the Roman wall. It happens to be both in Greater London and around the City.

> Title should probably read "the City of London" rather than "London".

There’s only one Roman city wall in London, it is not ambiguous.

That’s the Lord Mayor of London. The Mayor of London is The head of the Greater London Authority (which is not a city). No, it is not confusing.

What about Southwark?

That has a cathedral too.

If you look at the actual document it's 1¾ miles, which seems to have been incorrectly OCRed or copy-pasted.

Sounds like Basilica of San Clemente[1][2]. One of the many many many "hidden" gems of Rome. Highly recommend visiting it!

Or you can go on a virtual tour[3]

[1] https://www.basilicasanclemente.com/eng/

[2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/zpXpQuxQLUvE5TLA9

[3] https://www.basilicasanclemente.com/eng/a-virtual-tour/

For further confusion there are two cities within the (historical) county of London - the city of Westminster and the city of London.

A cathedral is neither necessary nor sufficient for city status. City status in the UK is given by the monarch and that's all there is to it. Cambridge is a city without a cathedral and Bury St Edmunds is a town with a cathedral.

> That car park in image [4] is wild. The juxtaposition of a mundane parking

Meh.

Let me introduce you to Colchester, the oldest recorded town in the UK. The wall behind the carpark you see here is the original Roman wall (circa 65 AD) with modern brick on top... (The tourist sign is in the foreground if you zoom in). The walls were built after the city was sacked by the rebel queen Boudica in 60 AD.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.887807,0.9045163,3a,81.3y,...?

Oh, and if you rotate the streetview 180 degrees, between the trees you can make out the ruins of St Botolph's Priory, sacked during the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 AD. It's a nice place for a lunchtime picnic.

Thanks! And this is the article I remember https://www.exurbe.com/the-shape-of-rome/

> Let me introduce you to Colchester, the oldest recorded town in the UK.

And a candidate for the location of Camelot, thanks to its Roman name, Camulodunum.

Not London Wall related but the London Bloomberg HQ when it was built reconstructed the Temple of Mithras at the actual position, quite deep underground.

I can only imagine how many similar places to see ancient ruins in everyday context are in Rome. Or Athens.

I went on that Open House tour, and they said the window view is a secret until opening day. They've told contractors not to take personal photos.

For context, this line is Thameslink, just south of Farringdon, on the east (heading south) side.

In a locked room off that car park is a bit more of that fortification. https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/visiting-roman-ruins-hi...

Show 'em the Hole in the Wall.

Very few people on HN will have been alive when there was a county of London. It ceased to exist in the 1960s.

The UK does not require this layer of subdivision to exist, so it's not that there's a different county or set of counties covering the same area now but rather there is no county. This is a contrast to say the US system where AIUI there must be a county and in some cases that county doesn't really matter (e.g. New York County in New York City aka Manhattan) but it has to exist anyway.

City status is very different here, the Monarch (ie now Charlie) gets to decide what is or is not a city, but because that's arbitrary it also has very few consequences, it's a cosmetic basically, you can write "City" on some signs if you like, but if you feel like a small town you still feel like a small town, and if you already feel like a bustling city then having the word doesn't make a real difference.

Indeed. Southend got city status mostly because their MP was murdered.

UK is a country made up of 4 countries, I guess we really like to annoy anyone trying to define a hierarchy

I'm terrible at keeping secrets so, it was probably a bad idea to let me go on the tour, or, perhaps we should try to have fewer secrets so that I'd remember ?

"And by 'country' we mean a sovereign state that is a member of the UN in its own right"

As is Southwell.

And the US the a sovereign state made up of 50 states. They used to be called that because they were independent countries

There are other offenders, but the US and UK together are probably the main reason English no longer has concise but unambiguous way to refer to sovereign states

One more strange place: the barbershop in Leadenhall Market. You can see the wall right in the barbershop.

In fact, this wall drove their rent higher and eventually they closed.

(Forgive the sob story, but the barber was amazing, and they closed down + fired everyone with no notice to customers. I have not been able to track him down since!)

Nevermind the wall, this person's blog dates back to 2002.

I think I have a blog/digital journal from around 2007 or so, but with HUGE gaps (years) where I lost interest.

Pretty incredible in its own right

Ah I didn't realize it was that fast! I always pictured a few mm per 1k years.

On the subject of walls... Cortez reported seeing a wall blocking off an entire valley on his way to Tenochtitlan. One source reported the wall was 6 miles long, and yet it seems to have disappeared without a trace. And yet, Both the London Wall and Hadrian's Wall, though much older still have surviving ruins to this day.

In Exeter[1], we still have roughly 70% of our Roman wall[2], and there is even a pedestrian footbridge over a road where part of the "bridge" involves walking along the top of the wall's remains.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isca_Dumnoniorum [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exeter_city_walls

We bury our kings in car parks.

> the oldest recorded town in the UK

It's a bit of an "oldest pub" claim and the council has since upgraded it to "Britain's first City" after getting city status in 2022! It's MP called it "the most arrogant council in Britain" which we can add to it's claims for fame.

There were millions of Britons and plenty of other town-worthy settlements with 1000s of years of human activity but they were mostly proto-literate. There had been 100s of years of trade with Greeks/Romans but pre-conquest writing is imperious enough to refer to land masses or at best the Oppidum (town/stronghold/capital) of a Celtic king but not deign to record the local name.

The key for Colchester was being where someone who could write cared enough to do so. The Roman invasions started in the South East and the Catuvellauni led the resistance. Once defeated the Romans set up a fortress on the site of their capital Camulodunum later turning it into the official colonial capital. Now that it's Roman, it becomes acceptable enough for Pliny to write down it's name.

My best effort to spite Colchester City Council is with coin inscriptions. Celtish Kings with sufficient Roman influence e.g. Gaulish tribes that had migrated, would mint coins with latin script and here is one with that refers to the capital where it was minted 100s of years before Pliny:

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/C_1988-0627-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calleva_Atrebatum

It's the capital of the Atrebates, Calleva Atrebatum. The oppidum of a king minting coins is a good enough to be a "town" for an HN comment. Congratulations to Silchester in Hampshire!

Seems like a missed opportunity to have a tube station inside the museum.

I wonder if they exaggerated things to make their conquest seem even more impressive

Both infrastructures are made to last.

CGP Grey has an informative video on the City of London:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc

There's also a bit of it in the WeWork on Leadenhall Street: https://www.wework.com/en-GB/buildings/77-leadenhall-street-...

Otherwise not a very good WeWork.

Frankly, they didn't much need to do so. The empire they encountered was epic and amazing.

> They used to be called that because they were independent countries

The latter part is true of exactly one US state (Hawaii), but otherwise false. They are called that because they are political bodies capable of international relations. The 13 founding states were British colonies; Florida, New Mexico and Texas were famously Mexican and/or Spanish colonies, and the western half of the continental states were French colonies (though largely unexplored by France, so only nominally held).

The (US) Port of Toledo wants to join the discussion.

Even though a large part of its inhabitants don't realize it has a port.

Can we learn from you?

Or many places in Europe, except where World Wars demolished them with artillery.

Edit: or Asia and Russia and South America...

Golf clap.

I went to the UK this summer and followed this guide for seeing the various sections of the wall: https://londonmymind.com/london-wall-walk/

Unfortunately it didn't mention the section in that carpark! But I can attest that the section behind the Leonardo Royal Hotel is amazing. I also recommend the tower remains on the Barbican estate (and really, just wander around the Barbican for a while, it's a wild place in general).

Cool

Cool3

There is a Templar church in London off Fleet Street as well, and again, being used as intended.

Plus the crypt of St Bride's has a Roman pavement to look at. Nice and quiet down there.

Worms as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Formation_of_Vegetable_Mou...

You'll have to be more specific, there are at least two, a couple thousand miles apart.

I like Fairfax, VA. It is surrounded by, but not part of, Fairfax County, VA. Despite this, it still serves as the county seat.

Looks like 2007 shows a 404, so maybe there are a few tiny gaps. Still, over 23 years of constant blogging is pretty awesome indeed. It’s in stark contrast to blogspot pages I’ve found that stopped in 2011

I found that I generally ran out of things to talk about after a couple of years. I have more hobbies now so perhaps I could go a lot longer, but talking about those would make a feed nobody wants to follow.

Cut stone is worth stealing to make new buildings.

In 1491 the point is made that the Inca believed that they had been beaten by superior gods and so they bowed out. But he doesn’t really talk about what happened to the Aztecs. You steal stone from structures you don’t care about anymore.

Didn’t Mexico see more intensive colonization? Settlers would care less about existing structures. Maybe the Spaniards built missions out of the wall.

I have one current blog, three blogs that are still hosted and one that is only in Internet Archive :)