London Under (3 page)

The archaeology of the city really only began at the beginning of the last century, with salvage work undertaken by the
Guildhall Museum. Largely driven by enthusiastic diggers and antiquarians, the museum housed
coins and pottery vessels found in all parts of London; prehistoric objects, from stone tools to bronze weapons, were taken from the Thames and added to the collection. The curators would visit the sites of demolition or excavation, and remove any object that seemed to be of historical value. They often purchased items from the building workers themselves and accumulated many Roman, medieval and post-medieval relics. One curator,
G. F. Lawrence, found more than 1,600 objects in the first six months of his employment. The past was flowing out. In this period was found the “Palaeolithic floor” lying beneath
Stoke Newington Common; it has since been covered over and concealed by new building.

The Roman galley discovered during the building of
County Hall, 1910
(illustration credit Ill.3)

T
he bombing of the Second World War marks the emergence of proper archaeological investigation in the city. The bombs destroyed London’s present but helped to rebuild London’s past. They revealed
Roman London, for example, and the extent of the great Roman wall around the city became known. As the sites of bombing were thoroughly investigated, the wall rose again. In the underground car park beneath
London Wall a large section of the original Kentish ragstone and red clay tiles can still be seen; in another part of the same building the foundations of the western corner of a fort have been preserved.

A fragment of London’s
basilica rests in the basement of a shop in
Leadenhall Market. Beneath the
Guildhall lay an amphitheatre capable of holding 6,000 spectators; the wooden gateway to the arena was 16 feet wide. A great building that is likely to be a cathedral, the first Christian cathedral in England, has been revealed beneath
Pepys Street by
Tower Hill. Will St. Paul’s be found on some future date beneath the earth?

In the basement of 100
Lower Thames Street extends a complete Roman bath-house; within the debris was found a Saxon
brooch, dropped by a woman when clambering over the ruins. Tiled pavements of Roman London have been found at various locations. Roman curses, inscribed on
pottery and stone, have also been revealed.
A painting of a robed woman lay beneath 5
Fenchurch Street; she may have been the decoration of a tavern. An iron ring was found at
New Fresh Wharf with the inscription
da mihi vita
(give life to me). Four stars were also inscribed upon it, as a sign of eternity.

Part of a Roman wall found behind
the Minories, from Charles Knight,
London
, 1841–4
(illustration credit Ill.4)

Piece by piece Londinium is restored. The damp earth has preserved it so well that from the evidence once lying beneath the ground we may conjure up a great
city with a
basilica, amphitheatre, arena and numerous public buildings; we see bath-houses and monumental
statues, shrines and palaces. Sacred artefacts continue to be preserved beneath the earth, such as the monumental
Screen of the Gods of which only portions have been found; it now rests within the
Museum of London. It was a stone façade of some 19 feet, with the images of six gods carved on either side. Some of these images remain undiscovered beneath the earth. So the underworld still contains gods and heroes. The head of a river god, carved in oolitic limestone, was discovered beneath Great Dover Street in
Southwark. A carved sphinx came out of the bowels of
Fenchurch Street. Bacchus had his seat of power at
Poultry, where two figurines were found. Isis ruled under Walbrook, with images of her and her family close to the Mithraeum. The Mithraeum itself—the temple dedicated to Mithras in the middle of the third century—was found 18 feet beneath Walbrook, and such was the excitement aroused by the discovery that in the autumn of 1954 80,000 people visited the site. It exemplifies the power of that which has been lost and found again. The same excitement was generated by the rediscovery of the Rose Playhouse, in Southwark, during the course of excavations in 1989.

A spot of sacred ground retains its sanctity over many centuries. When the bombs of the Second World War had reduced St. Mary-le-Bow to ruins, it was discovered that its crypt was in essence a
Roman building; at a depth
of 18 feet a Roman road passed what must once have been the entrance to a temple above the ground. In similar fashion it was discovered that the undercroft of All Hallows, by the Tower of London, was built of Roman brick. It also once lay above the surface, and was used as a barber’s shop; a groove in the pavement indicates a supply of running water. Beneath the crypt of
Southwark Cathedral have been excavated
statues of Neptune and of a hunter god; an altar has also been found. There are other forms of continuity; excavations beneath
the Treasury in
Whitehall uncovered the waterlogged remains of two successive timber halls dating to the ninth century.

The
head of Mithras, found buried beneath the temple nave in 1954
(illustration credit Ill.5)

As a result of these discoveries certain streets acquire
wholly new identities.
Cromwell Road in West London is the site of a Saxon community, while Creffield Road in
Acton has revealed Palaeolithic settlers; in
Hopton Street,
Southwark, a bowl from the
Bronze Age has come to light.
Knightrider Street, below St. Paul’s, concealed
walls of a great terrace that has been interpreted as the retaining wall of a circus where chariot races were held; hence the name of the street. Wooden structures of the early Iron Age have been found at Richmond Terrace in
Westminster, and there is evidence of a submerged forest at
Bankside. There have been surprises from the first ages of the human world. A votive object, known as the “Dagenham Idol,” was buried 8 feet under the edge of the Dagenham marshes; it had been underground for almost 4,500 years. A wooden dugout canoe, containing a flint axe and a flint scraper, was recovered from beneath the
Erith marshes.

C
rypts, and
vaults, and burial grounds are also part of the identity of the city. Their roots are very ancient. There are photographs, in volumes of London archaeology, in which the excavator can be seen crouched over a bent skeleton, the living implicitly copying the dead. And, in large part, the original city was built upon the bones of the dead. “It was a solemn consideration,” Charles Dickens wrote in an essay entitled
“Night Walks” (1861),

From Roman London alone there issued a million corpses. The graveyard of
Christ Church,
Spitalfields, was opened for business in 1729 and closed in 1859; between those dates some 68,000 people were somehow buried in the straitened space. At the time of excavation in 1993 soft tissue was still preserved on some of the bodies. Fears were expressed of a miasma overwhelming the archaeologists, but they were misplaced.

The excavation of cemeteries allows us to see the dead in every sense. We learn about the social and familial groups that once inhabited the city; we understand the
diseases that afflicted them, and how urban life in general affected individual health. How many of the dead were natives, and how many were immigrants? A soldier, G. Pomponius Valens, was buried beneath
Kingsway while Vivius Marcianus lay beneath
Ludgate Hill; Celsus, a military policeman, was beneath
Blackfriars. Marcus Aurelius Eucarpus, dead at fifteen, was interred in
Camomile Street. A mausoleum and temple
were found beneath the ground at Southwark, overlooking a roadside cemetery; the buildings had been painted with red ochre, predating the ox-blood tiles of the London Underground stations.

Almost every London church had its own cemetery. Before 1800 there were more than 200 places of burial, most of which are now unknown and unseen. In the little burial ground on the corner of Fetter Lane and Bream’s Buildings there is a stone on which is carved the name of a child, “Samewell.” This may be construed as a Dickensian pronunciation of Samuel, as in Samivell Weller, or it may simply be the same well into which we are all drawn. Our knowledge of London is increased by the buried dead. The suicides of the city were, until 1823, buried at a particular crossroads that exists still at the junction of
Grosvenor Place and
Hobart Place; it may therefore be deemed to be an unlucky spot.

We may also speak of the later
catacombs of London, communities of the dead buried beneath the earth in serried ranks and laid out in passageways and corridors at Brompton and Norwood, Kensal Green and Highgate, Abney Park and Tower Hamlets. There are ten of them, built in the mid-nineteenth century; the
Victorians put their trust in burial deep below the surface. The Victorians also created a cult of death, made up of fear and sentimentality equally; the catacombs are their temples of worship. These are not as ornate or elaborate as the great ossuary beneath the surface of Paris, nor are
they as intimate and claustrophobic as the
catacombs of Rome. In Rome the early Christians sheltered, against persecution, alongside their dead; this element of sacred terror is absent from the London catacombs. They also differ from those of Paris. The Parisian catacombs are urban and mythical; the London variety is suburban and practical. The buildings of Brompton or of Norwood partake neither of the maze nor of the labyrinth; they are designed on a grid pattern, with a central cross. The arched brick is familiar to anyone acquainted with Victorian architecture. The dead are laid in galleries of these brick chambers striated by damp, in individual niches or stacked in bays. In 1869 the writer of a descriptive guide to Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington referred to the catacomb in that graveyard as a “cold and stony death place.… The chilliness is awful and repulsive.”