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Authors: Charlotte Higgins

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She was not the only writer to be struck by London’s appearance of antique decay after the Blitz. Rose Macaulay, in a postscript to her 1953 book
The Pleasure of Ruins
, wrote vividly of ‘the new ruins’, summoning up ‘the lane of tangled briars that was a street of warehouses’; the ‘jungled caverns’ where ‘stood a large tailor’s shop … Tomorrow or tonight, the gazers feel, their own dwelling may be even as this.’ The fronds and branches of untameable vegetation are simply waiting their chance, biding their time: they will take over, in the end.

I went down to street level, opposite the glass-and-steel of 88 Wood Street, a Richard Rogers building, which, with its blue-and-red funnels emerging from the pavement in front of it, resembled an ocean liner. Following a sign to the Museum of London’s goods entrance, I descended a ramp, which took me below street level, to the medieval bastions. Here was the entrance to an underground car park, where there is another chunk of the Roman wall, exposed during the bombing and preserved by the Corporation of London. As I entered, the attendant gazed at me glassily, as if, like Charon, he expected a coin. The chunk of wall is parked in bay 52, next to the motorbikes and scooters, past the BMWs and the Mercs of the City workers. It stands two and a half metres tall, and is thickly made from Kentish ragstone, sliced through with three layers of tile courses. I was beset by the headachey smell of old petrol. Every few seconds came a sound as of a blasting wind: a heavy vehicle passing overhead. I ascended gratefully, not looking back. By the entrance, through a forbidding metal door marked ‘Private’, there are the remains of an early-second-century fort gate. Once in a while, the Museum of London organises viewings. Otherwise, you would never know it was there.

I climbed back up on to the Highwalk and this time went on into St Alphage Gardens: a knot garden of bloomless wintry roses and beeches bristling with dead foliage. This – one of Pevsner’s ‘odd leafy corners’ – had been created by the bombs, and through it runs another chunk of the wall. You can read its history in the stone and brick: it is Roman at the base and medieval at the top, the brick battlements built when it was restored during the Wars of the Roses. Behind are the ruins of the medieval tower of St Alphage Church, bombed. To read the 1957 London Pevsner is to read a war memorial (restrained, taxonomical) for the city churches. St Alban, Wood Street: ‘a grievous war loss’. St Augustine, Watling Street: ‘The graceful lead spire of 1695 is destroyed.’ St Lawrence Jewry: ‘burnt out. The glorious woodwork is all perished.’ St Nicholas Cole Abbey: ‘Burnt out and now standing surrounded by devastation.’ St Swithin, Cannon Street: ‘burnt out’. Dutch Church: ‘destroyed by a direct hit’. Many of the losses were Wren churches. The City of London had been reduced once more to a ‘great Plain of Ashes and ruins’. Later, in the British Library, I leafed through a Corporation of London report produced just after the war. There was page after page of photographs of the shattered
city. Sometimes a lonely classical column, perhaps from one of Wren’s churches, still stood amid the rubble.

I descended from the heights and entered the yard of the Guildhall, the headquarters of the Corporation of London. In the paving on the ground was picked out a wide circle in dark-coloured tiles. It marked the outline of the ancient amphitheatre, which was discovered when the Guildhall Art Gallery was being built to replace its bombed predecessor. Go into the art gallery and head downstairs, beneath the Rossettis, the Alma Tademas, and the bronze head of the young Prince Charles, and you can enter the east gate of the amphitheatre, with its walls still there – low, but legible. It was built around
AD
70: a timber drain was dated using the technique of dendrochronology, in which tree rings are counted to determine the precise year the tree was felled. It was rebuilt in stone about
AD
120, perhaps to coincide with the visit of the architecture- and engineering-loving Emperor Hadrian to Britannia. The stone amphitheatre was embellished with Egyptian marble, its walls lined with painted plaster. The excavators found the traces of what could have been trapdoors, lifted to let animals into the arena – perhaps wolves, bears or boars. In the amphitheatre’s drains were excavated a gold-and-pearl necklace clasp, coins, a hairpin: the curious archaeological business of finding lost property that has outlived its owners by millennia. One day I watched modern performers re-enact gladiatorial games in the Guildhall yard. It was skilfully done, and jovial: the master of ceremonies threatened to drag into the arena anyone whose mobile phone rang. We in the audience gamely spread our hands wide to indicate mercy, or clenched our fists and extended our thumbs to communicate ‘death’ (a system regarded as more historically authentic than the Hollywood thumbs-up, thumbs-down routine). The fighter I liked the best called herself Achillea: in real life she was an art and design teacher in a secondary school. She found beating her husband in single combat, she told me, ‘a great stress-buster’.

From the Guildhall, I walked down Gresham Street to Bank. Here once stood what was arguably Sir John Soane’s masterpiece, the Bank of England. In the 1930s, it was drastically remodelled. This represented, according to Pevsner, the City’s most egregious architectural loss, Blitz notwithstanding. During the work, Roman mosaics were found nearly eight metres below the ground. One can be seen in the
bank’s museum, and the other is viewable by appointment, preserved where it was discovered. I followed a uniformed attendant as she walked me through marble-floored corridors and down a great cantilevered staircase into the bowels of the building. I joked that we must be near the vaults – she inclined her head seriously, to suggest that that was indeed precisely where we were. The mosaic was right at the bottom of the staircase, a simple but attractive guilloche design with a labyrinthine border. I thought of poor Soane. In the museum were drawings of the bank being eviscerated during the pre-war rebuilding work. The curious paintings Soane commissioned from his pupil Joseph Michael Gandy, envisioning it as a classical ruin in some long-distant future, had been prophetic.

I left the bank and crossed over to James Stirling’s postmodern ark of a building, 1 Poultry. When it was being built, in 1994, archaeologists found a writing tablet. The wax covering the ‘page’ of silver fir, preserved by the damp of the nearby Walbrook Stream, had nearly worn away, but the stylus had scratched through the wax, leaving faint marks on the wood. Dr Roger Tomlin, a papyrologist at the University of Oxford, was with difficulty able to decipher them. It was a legal document: a deed of sale for a slave called Fortunata (or ‘Lucky’), a woman of an obscure Gaulish tribe. She was being sold to Vegetus, ‘the slave of Montanus the slave of the August Emperor and sometime
assistant slave of Secundus’. Montanus, in the service of the emperor, might have been a figure in the financial administration of the province. Roman slaves such as he – bureaucrats in the imperial service – could easily have owned slaves of their own. Fortunata was ‘guaranteed healthy, and warranted not to be liable to wander or run away’.

I emerged from Poultry on to Queen Victoria Street. It was between these two roads that the Bucklersbury mosaic was revealed in 1869 – an endlessly sinuous combination of strict geometry and trailing, stylised foliage that is now on display in the Museum of London. A picture in the
Illustrated London News
of the time shows ladies and gentlemen, all crinolines and toppers, being shepherded by bobbies as they queued up to look at it. Until recently, you could see the London Mithraeum here too. When it was excavated in 1954, and identified as a temple by the archaeologist W. F. Grimes, ‘only a mild interest was taken’, recalled Ralph Merrifield in his 1968 book
Roman London
. It was the discovery of a delicately carved marble head of Mithras that changed everything. The ‘unveiling of an ancient mystery cult in the workaday world of the City seemed to touch a chord of imagination and romanticism’, he wrote. Sixty thousand people came to see the new discovery over three days. Public opinion wanted it preserved and displayed. But building work on the new Legal and General building, Bucklersbury House, was about to start, right on top of the excavations. To replan the arrangement of somewhat featureless, but essentially pleasing modernist slabs would have cost £300,000 – no small sum in 1950s austerity Britain. So the temple of Mithras was moved, wholesale (though not with great accuracy or precision) to the Queen Victoria Street side of the new building, where it sat for half a century in a forecourt between the blocks, a slightly gloomy and unexciting ruin: a rectangle of squat grey walls, apsidal at one end, all encased in concrete. It was quite hard to imagine it serving as the temple for a men’s mystery cult, its barrel-vaulted ceiling deliberately low, the room cavelike and dark, the benches lining its nave thickly packed with men enacting scenes of Persian-inspired ritual.

Bucklersbury House is no longer there; it was pulled down in 2011. On my visit in the chill January of 2012, I was stopped short by the new gaping space, the unexpected view of sky and steeples. The Mithraeum was no longer to be seen. The life cycles of this constantly
self-destroying, self-renewing city are shrinking: it is now the turn of the post-Blitz buildings to be flattened and replaced. Norman Foster is the architect for the next iteration of Bucklersbury House, this time to be called Walbrook Square. The Mithraeum is to be moved – again – and displayed in the new development.

The fortunes of Londinium’s remains are inextricably linked with the economic fortunes of the City of London. When the property market sinks, Londinium is more likely to lie undisturbed. When it booms, the archaeologists move in, ahead of the builders. One day, Roy Stephenson, the head of archaeological collections at the Museum of London, took me to the museum’s store and study collection in Shoreditch: the home of the less glamorous, less attractive cousins of the objects on public display. Inside, it was dark and almost windowless. The occasional shaft of light illuminated researchers rustling about among the lines of shelving. You could find bricks here that had been charred by the Great Fire; but we turned to the Roman section. Here were 150,000 archive boxes containing the relics and shards of Roman London, stacked on ten kilometres of shelves. They were blandly labelled (‘bone’; ‘tile’) and arranged according to their year of discovery. You could read London’s boom and bust in these boxes. For overblown 1988, I counted twenty-two shelves of finds; for 1989, the year of the crash, fourteen; for recessionary 1990, six, for 1991, two and a half.

Perhaps, though, I was being sentimental about Bucklersbury House. Londinium, no less than London, could be cavalier about the past. Romans inscribed their deaths and their reverence to the gods in stone, and we expect with that monumentality to come permanence. But Romans pulled down Roman monuments and did what they liked with them. Christopher Wren’s tombstone to Vivius Marcianus had been built into the Roman city wall at Ludgate. Another memorial sculpture in the Museum of London shows a man wearing a sword and cloak, holding a set of writing tablets – presumably a military man seconded into administrative work for the governor. His tomb was recycled into a tower wall at Camomile Street, up near Bishopsgate.

The break-up and reuse of monuments has set numerous puzzles for antiquaries. Charles Roach Smith is one of the most intriguing figures in the history of Londinium’s rediscovery. He was a pharmacist who kept a shop on Lothbury, near the Bank of England. His chief
delight was to range over the City’s building sites, picking up antiquities from the construction workers employed in building London’s sewers in the 1830s and 40s. It must have been a useful source of extra income for the navvies, some of whom must surely have developed an ‘eye’ for coins or Samian ware. His diaries show the level of his commitment: for his entry of 28 June 1838, he briefly noted that today was ‘the Coronation of Victoria’. But he was more interested in his visit to Leadenhall Street. ‘Fragments of Samian Pottery … were lying about and the men told me some good things had been found there,’ he wrote. ‘On my return found that in Bartholomew Lane a fine tessellated pavement had been found about 15 feet deep, and broken up by the workmen …’ He fought a long and difficult battle with the Corporation of London, condemning its indifference to the antique city that was being broken up so carelessly, without any attempts at preservation or even record-keeping. His diary entry for 13 December 1838 railed against ‘the great want of energy in the society in regard to their obtaining correct … information on discoveries made in various parts of the kingdom which … are too often suffered to remain unrecorded’. Londoners were so transfixed by the quotidian demands of profit and loss, he lamented in his 1859 book
Illustrations of Roman London
, that they were blind to their own history. In describing a portion of the Roman wall at Tower Hill, he adopted a typically mournful tone. ‘Although the wall was … saved from imminent destruction, it could not be preserved from the effects of the prevailing spirit of the day, which cannot recognise the utility of ancient monuments except in the ration of their applicability to the necessities of trade, and the common, practical purposes of life; and the wall is now a side wall for stables and out-houses, and, of course, is hidden from public view.’

BOOK: Under Another Sky
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