Under Another Sky (10 page)

There is still a length of wall at Tower Hill, and Roach Smith might be pleased to see that it is no longer crowded in by ‘stables and outhouses’, but stands in its own patch of garden, through which the City workers hurry on their way to the Tube. It was at Tower Hill, in 1852, that Roach Smith made one of his most significant discoveries: a tombstone built up into a bastion of the city wall. It is now in the British Museum. With it, he recalled in
Illustrations of Roman London
, were ‘a great number of broken cornices, shafts of columns, and foundation stones of a building or buildings of magnitude’. The slab
was inscribed with the words ‘
(D)IS MANIBUS FAB(I) ALPINI CLASSICIANI
’. Interpreting fragmentary inscriptions can be a difficult business. The first part was all right: ‘
dis manibus
’ means ‘to the shades of the dead’, indicating that it was indeed a tombstone. The next bit looked easy enough, too: the genitive case of what was clearly a name. And not any name, but Classicianus – a figure actually mentioned by Tacitus in his
Annals
. Gaius Julius Alpinus Classicianus was the Gaulish procurator of the province of Britannia immediately after Boudica’s revolt – brought in to replace the hapless official who had fled in the thick of the violence.

It must have been an extraordinary moment for Roach Smith when he recognised the name, enabling him to line up archaeological and historiographical evidence in a rare, and thus no doubt extremely satisfying, way. Perhaps it is just as well, then, that by 1928 – after a retirement writing treatises on pomology among his beloved Kentish orchards – he was long dead. For that year, R. G. Collingwood, one of the great historians of Roman Britain, as well as one of the most significant philosophers of his day, flattened Roach Smith’s hypothesis, writing that ‘Roach was obviously wrong to think of connecting [the figure in the inscription] with Julius Classicianus in Tacitus,
Annals
XIV, 38.’ He instead conjectured that the inscription might have something to do with the word ‘
classis
’, fleet – it could mean ‘Fabius Alpinus, formerly of the navy’. Perhaps he believed that the connection with Classicianus was simply too good to be true. So the matter rested until 1935, when the missing chunk of the monument was found during the construction of an electricity substation, also at Tower Hill. The extra jigsaw piece added the crucial words ‘procurator of the province of Britain’, and the information that his wife Julia Pacata Indiana, a Gaul from an important tribe, had erected the tomb in his honour. Roach Smith had been right after all.

From the Mithraeum, I turned to walk down Walbrook and reached Cannon Street, where I found the object known as the London Stone, set into the facade of a boarded-up 1960s office block. Underneath the modern railway station, on the other side of the road, impressive Roman buildings once stood, perhaps offices for the provincial or city administration. One theory, first propounded by Wren, is that the London Stone is a remnant of these buildings. At any rate, it is an object to which many myths cling (such as the fantasy that it was a
Druid’s sacrificial altar, as in Blake’s ‘They groan’d aloud on London Stone’; or even that it is the boulder into which King Arthur’s sword was once plunged). Camden thought it might have been a Roman milestone, marking distances to other parts of the province, ‘considering it is in the very mids of the City’. In the nineteenth century, it was moved from an inconvenient spot in the middle of Cannon Street into the wall of Wren’s St Swithin’s Church. And when St Swithin’s went in the Blitz, the stone was moved again to its new home. When I visited it, it was surrounded in its niche by fag ends and discarded train tickets, and what seemed to be grains of wheat and a couple of almonds (as if in obscure offering). It was awaiting more glamorous quarters: there were plans to display it with the Mithraeum in the new Walbrook Square building, though what sense anyone would make of this obscure chunk of rock, I couldn’t tell.

At any rate, I felt self-conscious as I squatted in the street to examine the London Stone, and so I continued along Cannon Street and turned left up Gracechurch Street, which, as it becomes Bishopsgate, then Shoreditch High Street, and then Kingsland Road, is really the beginning of Ermine Street, which would take you all the way to York if you kept going. But more immediately, Londinium’s forum stood exactly in my path. The point where Fenchurch Street crosses Gracechurch Street marks, more or less, the southern edge of Londinium’s forum; the crossing with Cornhill its northern boundary. It was vast: 170 square metres (each side just short of the length of St Paul’s). A three-storey basilica, holding law courts and the city’s senate, ran the length of the forum’s north side. It was the biggest building this side of the Alps: its nave was 100 metres long. It is shiveringly hard to conceive of anything so grandiloquent in this patch of the city, even as Richard Rogers’s Lloyd’s building looms down, just beyond the old forum’s north-east corner. Now, the only thing that can be seen of it is in the basement of Nicholson & Griffin, a barber’s at 90 Leadenhall. When I visited, the place was deserted but for a group of cheerful hairdressers folding towels. One of them was on the phone discussing hair dye. Another moved a few handbags so that I could sidle up to a glazed wall, through which I squinted to see one of the pier bases of the old basilica. It was hard to make anything of it: it was as if a cathedral had been reduced to a garden wall.

I headed down to Lower Thames Street, the north side of which marks the Roman shoreline, though there’s another block to go before you reach the modern riverside. The Romans themselves started inadvertently to narrow the Thames. As they built up their wharves and revetments, the banks gradually silted up, moving the land outwards. A clue to the original whereabouts of the water’s edge is the sharp slope of the little street called St Mary-at-Hill – the top of the steep ancient riverbank. Nearby, under a 1980s office block called Centurion House, was excavated a timber wall and riverside warehouses with their wooden shuttering intact.

On the corner of St Mary-at-Hill and Lower Thames Street is Centennium House, another City office block with a cod-classical name. In its southern frontage there is an unmarked opaque-glass sliding door. Here I met Jenny Hall, the now retired curator of Roman antiquities at the Museum of London. She unlocked it; behind was a second portal, more utilitarian, with signs forbidding smoking and warning of trip hazards. We stepped through and entered a kind of bunker with bare breeze blocks for walls and a large poster describing the necessary first aid after an injury to the eyes. There was a staircase leading downstairs. ‘Let’s make plenty of noise to scare away any other visitors,’ said Hall; it was a minute before I realised she meant rats. At the bottom, fluorescent strip lighting flickered into life and we saw London’s best-preserved Roman remains – the fragments of a luxurious waterfront villa and bathhouse. Hall said they were a miraculous survival – extraordinary that the builders who stumbled on them thought to preserve them, forty years before they were formally protected under the first Ancient Monuments Act of 1882.

Hall showed me the walls of an east and north wing of a dwelling, and between them, a suite of baths. Its entranceway was flanked by two semicircular rooms for warm and hot bathing, with the little pilae stacks that give away the presence of underfloor heating. In one corner a portion of the floor itself survived: hefty terracotta tiles that might have been overlaid with an elegant mosaic. From the baths’ entrance, a few steps lead down to a frigidarium, or cold room. The house gave right on to the river; Hall said she believed it was either a luxurious private home, or an inn with bathing facilities for riverborne travellers. Despite their wonderful legibility and good state of preservation, these
ruins are not open to public view, except on special open days organised by the Museum of London.

The house was built in the late second century and the baths added in the third; but at some point later the north wing collapsed and became a waste ground, covered, said Hall, in brambles, and inhabited by frogs, mice and snails. The east wing and the baths continued in use; and over 200 coins dated
AD
388 and later were discovered in the furnace room, as well as late Roman glass and an amphora from Palestine. These were the very dying years of Roman rule in Britain: had the coins been hidden against future collection? Offered to some god? Already, by this time, great swathes of Londinium were abandoned. There is a strip of loam in the archaeological layers, which some scholars believe means this now-vacant land was cultivated, by its later Roman inhabitants, as market gardens. Others believe the land became waste ground, and simply gave in to rot and decay: grass, brambles, weeds and scrub making their final, inevitable conquest of the ruins. This layer of soil is called by archaeologists ‘dark earth’.

After the end of Roman rule in
AD
408, Londinium, it is thought, was completely abandoned. When, later in the century, Anglo-Saxon settlements sprang up, they were dotted around the edges of the city, not inside it, in what are now London suburbs: Croydon, Battersea, Tulse Hill, Kingston, Upper Norwood. The Saxons established a port where the Royal Opera House now stands: but that was away to the west. It was only 400 years later, in the late ninth century, that Alfred the Great moved into the old city and made it his capital, taking advantage of its still-standing walls as a defence against the Vikings.

I think of Richard Jefferies’ novel of 1885,
After London
, which imagines a future Britain after some nameless disaster has depleted its population. London is contaminated and uninhabitable. Scrub and forest have greedily devoured the once cultivated countryside, so that it is a land of frightening, impenetrable forests. What remains of civilisation has lapsed into feudalism. Jefferies’ hero, Felix, ventures forth to a ‘dreadful place, of which he had heard many a tradition’: the ‘deserted and utterly extinct city of London’.

Jefferies writes: ‘For this marvellous city, of which such legends are related, was after all only of brick, and when the ivy grew over and shrubs sprang up, and, lastly, the waters underneath burst in, this huge metropolis was soon overthrown.’

In around
AD
450, half a century after the end of Londinium, someone had reason to walk over what is now Lower Thames Street, picking a path through the treacherous, collapsing old buildings and the undergrowth – an adventurer, like Jefferies’ Felix, in a lost city. Who was it? I want it to be a woman. So let it be a woman; a woman from over the German sea. Who knows what brought her here. Whatever she sought, she also lost something: a Saxon brooch was dropped here, among the fallen roof tiles, among the shards of other lives.

Heu Veii veteres! et vos tum regna fuistis,
et vestro posita est aurea sella foro:
nunc intra muros pastoris bucina lenti
cantat, et in vestris ossibus arva metunt.

(Alas, ancient Veii! You too were a kingdom once, and a golden throne was placed in your forum: now within your walls sounds the horn of an unhurried shepherd, and over your bones they gather the harvest.)

Propertius,
c
. 14
BC

Like the medieval city of Dunwich, which the North Sea claimed from the Suffolk coast and whose ghostly submerged church bells are still said to ring, Roman Silchester is a lost town, buried not by the grey eastern waves but by soil and an ocean of tall grass, through which the wind sings and sighs. Near Reading and Basingstoke, and a few miles from Aldermaston and the forbidding triple-fenced enclosures of the Atomic Weapons Establishment, Silchester hardly promises beauty or isolation by way of its setting. Yet it is tucked away at the heart of a deep labyrinth of narrow, high-hedged lanes that seem to stretch away to infinity when you are caught in their pleasant windings. To be here in midsummer is to witness the absolute triumph of nature over street and stone. The air is sickly-sharp with the scent of elderflower. Goldfinches stream brightly between hedgerows; swallows foregather on a wire; and high above, higher and higher, the singing specks in the sky are larks.

Merely finding Roman Silchester feels like unlocking a charm. Roger Wilson’s
Guide to the Roman Remains in Britain
grumbles that it is ill-signposted – which it is, and as the camper van nosed its trundling
way through the lanes, my head was buried in the map. We asked directions from the man who had come to empty the bins in the little public car park; he appeared to gesture all around. This seemed to be the typical experience of entering Silchester. When one Norris Brewer wrote up his trip here for the
Monthly Magazine
in 1810, he recalled: ‘I trod, with increasing ardor, and believed the object of our expedition yet distant, when my companion suddenly arrested my progress, by exclaiming: “We are there!”’ And when John Plummer and George Nelson visited in 1879, compiling a pamphlet optimistically entitled
Silchester: the Pompeii of Hampshire
, the same happened to them. ‘We wind our way through a succession of those lovely lanes which are so peculiarly the charm of our English land … and we wonder where the famous “city” which we have come so far to see, is to be found. We hail a country lad, who is engaged in agricultural pursuits, upon the other side of a hedge, and who, in answer to our question, “When shall we get to the ‘city’”, replies briefly, but very much to the purpose, “You be there now.”’