A History of Ancient Britain (58 page)

If Scotland’s capital grew up around seven hills, then the first version of Great Britain’s principal city came to occupy the land around three. Cornhill, Ludgate Hill (where St
Paul’s Cathedral now sits) and Tower Hill form a long, sharp triangle lying on its hypotenuse along the north bank of the River Thames. Between Cornhill and Ludgate Hill runs another river, a
tributary of the Thames called the Walbrook, long since forced underground and out of sight along with so much else.

Here then was the nucleus of the place that would be known in time as London, but it is impossible to pinpoint precisely when people first found meaning or importance there. A great river like
the Thames would have been one of the first major natural barriers encountered by the hunters who walked into the southern part of the British peninsula 10,000 or 12,000 years ago, once the ice had
retreated. Then as now it would have made sense to follow its route ever deeper inland, so that the territory later occupied by London was long defined by a well-trodden path, carrying people into
and out of Britain.

The land around those three hills, watered by three rivers (the Thames, the Walbrook and also the Fleet) would have been fertile. When people turned towards farming as a way of life they would
have found yet more
reasons to settle there, perhaps reassured too by the presence of the high ground provided by the nearby slopes.

Much later, by the zenith of the Celtic Iron Age, the Trinovantes tribe had their territory on land that included much of what is known now as Greater London, north of the Thames. The
twelfth-century cleric and writer Geoffrey of Monmouth would claim in his
Historia Regum Britanniae
that the original name of London was Trinovantum, from Troi-novantum, meaning ‘New
Troy’. He was therefore able to tie London to the ancient myth of Britain’s foundation by (and even named after) Brutus, a refugee from the Trojan War. Such stories sound fanciful to
us, but it is likely they have lasted so long because they contain some or other fragment of a truth.

Plentiful streams and rivers, along with marshlands and other forbidding nooks and crannies, would have provided the druids of the Trinovantes with sacred places for secret rites. There were
springs and wells too – Sadler’s Wells and Clerkenwell to name but two – known for their medicinal and curative powers right up into the modern era, and doubtless home to gods and
goddesses in their time as well.

So our cities are testament to the
longue durée
. Down in their depths is where the bronze and iron swords of warriors glint and glimmer like fish. Too deep for memory, London
– the name sounding like heartbeats, Lon-don . . . Lon-don . . . Lon-don – may have been marking the time as long as any. The modern streets and buildings are only the youngest carapace
to have hardened on the city’s back and all the old flesh lies beneath, sealed and preserved beyond the reach of decay. Nothing was ever cleared away, it seems, just knocked flat and covered
over to provide a level surface for the building of something new.

In the foundations of a derelict building, on the corner of King’s Arms Yard and Token House Yard in Moorgate, deep in the heart of Old London Town, I had the opportunity to catch a rare
and surreal glimpse of an ancient version of London.

The façade of the building itself, tucked out of sight now on a back street, was grand enough, and will be preserved as the outer skin of the new. The rest of it, however, will be razed
to the ground, and once inside it was easy to understand why. If the interior was ever possessed of any grandeur, it was long gone. There were occasional patches of something promising – some
Edwardian or Victorian wood panelling on a wall, a well-turned banister on a staircase – but successive occupants had interfered with the layout to such an extent it was mostly just a
depressing maze of soulless,
low-ceilinged rooms, subdivided by walls covered in layer upon layer of woodchip paper, thick as calluses on overworked hands. Vandals had been
into the place as well, and their obligatory tags were spray-painted everywhere I looked.

It was only in the foundation levels that anything of worth survived. I could hear the archaeologists long before I could see them, the sounds of their voices and their tools echoing up from
deep within the wrecked interior. For want of anywhere else to put it they had piled the spoil from their excavations into rooms in the basement, and it was as I passed the last of those heaps that
I began to notice the long shadows cast by high-powered arc lights. Finally I arrived at a series of hatches that gave access to a deep rectangular pit cut down through the lowest foundation levels
of the building and into the ancient earth beneath.

This was the surreal part. What they had created looked like every other archaeological dig – people in hard hats and overalls, wheelbarrows and shovels, surveying equipment on tripods,
trowels and brushes carefully deployed – and yet it was all happening indoors and deep underground, among shattered walls of brick and concrete and under the artificial glare of electric
light. Above their heads were criss-crossing steel joists supporting the ground floor of the building, the whole mass of it pressing down and creating a feeling of claustrophobia. It was hot and
airless down there too, all those blazing lights coupled with the sweat of hard physical labour, so that the place almost seemed to steam.

What archaeologist Alison Telfer and her team were uncovering in that bizarre bearpit of a site, however, was nothing less than a fragment of Roman London itself. If that grand name suggests
buildings of dressed stone, elegant statuary and the like, then picture something much more humble. Beneath modern Moorgate were the remains of a modest row of timber-built shops and workshops laid
out along a straight street – a shopfront if you will – and separated one from another by wooden fences. The whole lot of it sloped gently downwards, behind the row, towards the course
of an ancient stream, and it was the dampness from that old waterway that had worked a miracle of preservation.

As well as the carefully worked timbers that formed the foundations of the buildings, the archaeologists had found considerable amounts of leather. Rough-outs of soles, with holes punched for
stitching, along with piles of off-cuts, made plain that this part of Roman London was once home to craftsmen making and selling shoes. More amazing even than the
sight of
the pieces, was the smell of them. After the best part of 2,000 years the comforting, familiar scent of leather was unmistakable.

What has been revealed there is planned, urban development: the town that grew up in the years following the Claudian conquest of
AD
43. Whatever settlement Caesar had
found nearly a century before, he presumably left more or less alone. During the second half of the first century
AD
, however, the impact of foreign ideas began to make more
of a mark on the place. As early as
AD
50 the soldiers built a timber bridge across the Thames, at a site just a hundred yards or so to the east of the present London
Bridge. This engineering achievement alone may have been awe-inspiring for the locals. No doubt the Celtic Britons believed a river as mighty as the Thames must be home to a mighty god; and to see
the Thames tamed in such a way must have made them wonder just what else those incomers were capable of.

Whatever reaction that first London bridge provoked, it would have become a hub of activity, and quickly. Since the river could now be crossed, Roman London would have grown along both banks. No
doubt there was an existing British settlement somewhere close by, soon absorbed within what would have grown into a busy town of ordered streets laid out in a simple grid pattern. The Romans could
hardly have failed to notice either that the Thames led to an estuary served by a double tide, making it particularly useful for sea-going trade.

The conquest of Britannia was about trade, after all – taking control of British resources and extracting them for export all over the Empire. British minerals, metals, crops and manpower
were to be sent not just into Europe but as far as Africa and the Middle East as well. At the same time, foreign exotics would arrive in a settlement like Londinium ready for onward dispersal into
the rest of the ever-expanding province.

It seems that this place between three hills, watered by three rivers, was destined from the start to be the capital of a greater Britannia. If it started small and modest, it did not and could
not stay that way for long. As well as cargoes of Samian Ware, wine and olive oil and the rest, the boats arriving at the first harbour, possibly near Billingsgate, brought administrators as well.
These were the bean-counters who would organise and oversee; making sure every last ounce of value was squeezed from Rome’s latest acquisition.

There were setbacks along the way: sometime around
AD
60 the residents of Londinium were slaughtered by Boudicca’s warriors, their homes and
other buildings set aflame. More flames would follow, of course. London’s foundations form a cake of many layers and several of those are black as coal. These are the ashes of
the great fires – some few of Boudicca’s no doubt and some from the most famous of all the infernos, which consumed the old city in 1666. Archaeologists find that haunting proof of the
Great Fire every single time they open a deep trench within the City of London. Ironically it is the viewing platform at the top of Sir Christopher Wren’s monument to that particular fire
– a column of Portland stone standing a few minutes’ walk from the northern end of London Bridge – that gives the best sense of the scale of the Roman city.

During the second century
AD
Londinium rose to become Britain’s first metropolis, home to perhaps 40,000 people. It stretched from where St Paul’s sits on
Ludgate Hill, all the way across to where the Tower of London still stands defiant among younger usurpers in a crowded skyline. Together with the soldiers – tasked variously with the defence
of territory already held and the ceaseless advance into the north and west – there were all the sorts of people that make up any town or city. As well as merchants and businessmen,
administrators and clerks – those who create an ordered place in which to live – there would have been all the characters who make places worth living in, like artists, artisans,
writers and technologists.

It was not just Londinium that was on the up during the first century of the Roman occupation of Britannia. Other towns were growing too, thriving in those years when people realised it was
possible (and beneficial to the purse) to be Roman and British at the same time.

The advent of urban living was not limited to the south-east. From Bath in the west to York in the north, Roman ways were, by around
AD
200, deeply rooted in many parts
of Britain. In the far north, the domain of the Picts, the Empire had still to be on a war footing from time to time. But elsewhere the violence of conquest was a distant memory. Where once there
had only been garrisons of occupying soldiers surrounded by camp-followers, now there were towns co-ordinating and administering the settled government of perhaps three million people.

For many of those it had been a long time since they had felt themselves victims of an invasion. Instead they were willing accomplices of the most impressive, the most technologically advanced
empire the world had yet seen. The Roman infrastructure was firmly embedded in the landscape by then. The roads were no longer solely for the movement of advancing armies; now they were just as
important for the passage of merchants and
their trade goods, moving between the towns and cities.

There was already an aspirant middle class with an appetite for all things new and modern. Along with much else, the Romans introduced the benefits of mass-production to Britain, and as well as
tableware made of pottery, that meant glass too.

Consider glass for a moment, something as commonplace as a window pane. For the Celtic Britons, light was allowed inside a building through openings that let in wind and rain as well. Perhaps
thinly stretched skins or other organic membranes might have been used for weatherproofing the holes from time to time, but in the main, light was admitted at the expense of warmth. Then imagine
what it might have felt like to stand inside a building in front of a glass window – to be proofed against the elements and yet bathed in sunlight at the same time. (It is thought the
invention of glass was a happy accident to begin with, an almost natural event spotted and adapted by some observant soul. Keep a cooking fire burning on a sandy beach for a few hours – a
sandy beach that happens to include a fair amount of ground-down, lime-rich seashells – and clumps of a glass-like material might form among the embers. The development of the kind of glass
we take for granted, however, was the stuff of millennia of experiment and refinement.)

The Phoenicians had invented blown glass by around the middle of the first century
BC
, only for the Romans to acquire it for themselves. By using simple clay moulds, into
which glass could be blown to a regular shape and size, and with a ready-made decoration impressed into the sides, it was possible to mass-produce bottles and other items likely to capture the
imaginations of the buying public. Glass bottles and jugs would have been as wondrous as glass windows. Where before liquids had been held within pottery vessels, visible only from above, now it
was possible to see wine and oil through a solid material.

For a while it must have seemed as though the wonders would never cease. The list is endless and only scattered examples may be chosen to illustrate the range. Iron padlocks and the keys to open
and close them are to our eyes so commonplace as to be almost invisible, but once just the proof of their existence would have taken the breath away. Consider such a notion – ushering in the
possibility of the locked door. From now on there might be truly private property, or a money box.

Everywhere Britons turned, in that world made new, there were dazzling demonstrations of power and technical superiority; science fiction all of it.
There were soon
statues as well, gazing down from their plinths outside public buildings, life-size and lifelike representations of fellow human beings. From time to time you might actually have recognised the
subject of the effigy. No one in Britain (unless they had ventured abroad into longer-held Roman territory) could have conceived of such things.