Today, AD joins architect Nick Potts in London to uncover the city’s ancient Roman origins. Before London, there was Londinium, the capital of Roman Britain, and although it was abandoned by AD 450, the influence and some remnants of the ancient city still remain. Join Pott’s as he explores how modern London rose up from Roman ruins.
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00:00London is actually two cities, one built on top of the other. Before there was London,
00:04there was Londinium, an outpost of the Roman Empire that was founded right here in the heart
00:09of modern London. And it's from this ancient city, Londinium, that modern London takes its name and
00:14so much more. And there's still evidence of London's 2,000 year old Roman origins all over the city,
00:20if you know where to look. I'm Nick Potts, I'm an architect, and today we're taking a walking
00:25tour of London's Roman origins. It's not just the name London that comes from ancient Rome. The
00:39layout of the city, even including the location of London Bridge, is directly connected from the
00:44original plan of Roman Londinium. And even today, pieces of the ancient city continue to be discovered,
00:49giving us more clarity about how the rise and the fall of ancient Londinium shaped and
00:55continues to shape the modern city of London. So if all roads lead to Rome,
00:59let's start at the most important intersection of ancient Londinium.
01:07Right now we're standing at the most important intersection of Roman Londinium,
01:11because underneath our feet is the starting point of every Roman city, the Roman Forum.
01:17As Rome expanded, every new city they built was designed as a grid. And at the center of each grid
01:22was what's called the Forum. The Forum in a Roman city was both a marketplace for commerce,
01:26but also a marketplace of ideas. It was a place for politics, legal proceedings, and civic gatherings
01:32of all kinds. And in every Roman city, the Forum was located near the intersection of two major roads,
01:38which were called the Cardo and the Decumanus. The Cardo was the primary market street, and the Decumanus was
01:46the primary military street connecting the towns throughout the empire. And this phrase,
01:52all roads lead to Rome, has something to do with that. As the empire was expanding, symbolically,
01:58they wanted there to be a street that connected these provincial outposts and peripheral towns
02:04back to the heart of the empire, which was Rome. This is the intersection of Grace Church Street
02:10and Lombard Street, where it transitions to Fenchurch. And in Londinium, this is where the Roman Forum was.
02:16In a Roman outpost, the Decumanus was primarily east-west, and the Cardo was north-south. And if you
02:21look at the map of London today, you can still see this intersection of the Cardo essentially at Grace
02:28Church Street leading down to London Bridge, which was in the same location that London Bridge currently is,
02:34more or less. And in the case of Londinium, where the settlement was located directly north of the
02:41River Thames and the important port, which is the reason why the Romans decided to put this place here,
02:46the Cardo was this crucial link between the river and all the trade that happened on it and the main
02:51marketplace. So the commerce in Roman Londinium ran north to south on the Cardo and various streets
02:58parallel to it. And as a city that's primarily a medieval settlement, or was, London has a fairly ad hoc,
03:06informal grid. But in this area in particular, you can see a ghost of the grid of Roman Londinium, which
03:12was torn down in 8450. It's fairly unique in the older parts of London to see this grid structure, and
03:18that's a direct ancestor of the Roman settlement that existed here before. And you can see a ghost of that
03:25today in the names of the streets that currently exist between the Forum location and the River Thames.
03:32You see pudding, which talked about meat trade. You see fish hilt that talked about the movement of fish
03:39up and down. And even though these uses came back in the medieval city after Londinium was abandoned,
03:45it almost came back from the debt when the site was resettled. In fact, the Romans were the ones to
03:51first build a bridge across the tabs. And the location of that bridge currently can be seen in
03:58the street grid next to it. This original bridge would have been located parallel to where today's
04:04London Bridge is, and directly in alignment with the Cardo and connected to the Forum. But we don't
04:09need to look at the map to figure out where the Roman Forum would have been located in Londinium.
04:13Because in 2025, archaeologists drilled a massive hole into the floor of an office building,
04:19and uncovered the foundations of the most important building in Roman Londinium.
04:30Behind me is Leadenhall Market, one of London's most historic markets, and also the site of some of
04:37London's most newly rediscovered ruins. What was recently found underneath this building actually
04:42reconfirmed the location of Roman London's most important building, the Basilica. We're just down
04:49the street here from the center of the Forum, on nearly the exact site of the original Roman Basilica.
04:54In a Roman city, the Basilica was always located on one end of the Forum, and was a space used for
05:00political, economic, and administrative purposes, such as court proceedings. Leadenhall Market has existed in
05:06this location since roughly the 1300s, but the current structure was built in the late 1800s,
05:12designed by Horace Jones. And the building that he designed in the 19th century is strikingly similar
05:17to the Roman building that existed here nearly 2000 years ago. The word Basilica brings to mind a
05:23religious building, a Christian church, and that's no accident. A lot of early Christian churches
05:29took over the sites of Roman basilicas and their plan, which was a large central nave
05:35and side aisles. And the formerly secular kind of multi-purpose use of a Roman basilica was co-opted
05:43by a Christian typology. However, the mall or the market took on a similar sort of name. And so it's an
05:50interesting irony that the Leadenhall Market essentially co-opted the Basilica plan with a large
05:57vaulted central nave and its side aisles for the markets and shops, which is an almost reappropriation
06:05of this Roman space plan. And it's an amazing coincidence that this building type, this market,
06:11that's co-opted the type form of a Roman basilica was reconstructed in the 19th century directly over
06:19and in alignment with the original Roman basilica. And this was done without the architect likely
06:24knowing about the location or frankly the shape of the original Roman basilica. And while the basilica is
06:30the most recent rediscovery in Roman London, it's far from the only one. This site was carefully
06:35uncovered by archaeologists during the construction of a building next door. But many of the ruins of
06:40Roman London would have never been discovered had it not been for the bombings during the blitz of World
06:45War II.
06:50We're standing in the Barbican Center and the round tower you can see behind me was quite possibly
06:55the oldest piece of Roman construction within Londinium. The Barbican is a brutalist building
07:01complex that helped to inject modern architecture into the fabric of historic London. During the blitz
07:07of World War II, this area was heavily bombed and while the entire city that had been built up over
07:12the several thousand years was largely destroyed, what was revealed was a lot of Roman foundations and the
07:19basis for the original city. Before Roman Londinium, there was just a fort on this location and the
07:25location marked by that tower, even though the tower has been built up on and modified over the years,
07:30is the location of the northernmost corner of that fort. This was far from the only place that was
07:36bombed during the blitz and throughout the historic core of London, there were little bits and pieces
07:41that were discovered as almost treasures that emerged. Despite all the trauma of the bombing,
07:47parts of a fresco were discovered underneath Lime Street, the foundations of a massive building under
07:52the Cannon Street station, and the Temple of Mithras, which is currently on exhibition under the new
07:57Bloomberg headquarters. And similar to what was done with the Mithraeum, where it was really showcased as
08:02part of the new building, the Barbican takes that to an extreme and creates an entire landscape built
08:08around the fragments of its Roman past. And this is really the story of London, and you can see this
08:12all along the former Roman wall, these different layers, the Roman layer of wall, the medieval constructions
08:19both on top of and incorporating the wall, and new buildings popping up usually around it rather than
08:25on top of it showcasing it. So if you look around us in these very kind of openly modernist buildings,
08:32there are bits of the language of the Roman architecture that originally happened here. You see brick,
08:38you see arches, and they're reinterpreted in a very kind of contemporary, almost inverted way. You see
08:44these fragments of almost like a Roman concrete. So these buildings are riffing on the language of Roman
08:49architecture without explicitly copying it. And this is really what modernism of this period was
08:55trying to do. It was trying to monumentalize the past and create a new language that was fitting for
09:02modern times, as opposed to previous neoclassical revivals that were explicitly copying and mimicking
09:09the Romans. The Barbican is a very modern mixed-use complex with schools, with housing, an art center,
09:15public space, and an old church. And there's a very kind of modernist urban planning sort of vision
09:20for rebuilding the city that its architects, Chamberlain, Powell, and Bond, utilized to its utmost.
09:26And this is really a unique space in London, primarily because of the Blitz. The city had an
09:30opportunity to build something really at the scale of large modernist urban planning. And the trauma of the
09:37war created, in its horrific aftermath, an opportunity for London to experiment a bit with 20th century
09:44urban planning ideals. And the Barbican represents this in both its program, its style, and its form.
09:50This is just a small piece of London and its Roman origins. Let us know what other cities we should
09:55explore in the comments below.