Discovering Roman London after the Great Fire of 1666
It was Sir Christopher Wren who first drew the attention of the academic community to Roman remains when, during the rebuilding of St Mary-leBow after the Great Fire in 1671-3, he encountered ‘walls and windows also, and the pavement of a temple, or church of Roman workmanship’. Digging deeper on the site he also found evidence of a Roman road. There had long been a belief that a ‘Temple of Diana’ stood upon the site later occupied by St Paul’s Cathedral, but
Wren found no evidence of such a building when he commenced work on the rebuild and in fact ‘gave but little credit to the common story’. He even carried out test pits to establish how Ludgate Hill was formed and concluded that the Romans had built embankments to contain the River Thames. It could be argued that Wren was the first person to use both his knowledge of classical literature and careful archaeological observations to understand the history of the Roman City.
Stukeley’s map of Roman London
Bagford’s Roman moulded brick
From the late 17th century onwards more and more discoveries were made but most people were interested only in the most glamorous ones. However, a small number of amateur ‘antiquarians’ took an interest in all aspects of the Roman city, building up and privately exhibiting collections of their own. They included the apothecary, John Conyers, Dr John Woodward, and the shoemaker and book dealer John Bagford.
In 1724, in an essay published in the antiquarian Thomas Hearn’s book on John Leland (poet and antiquarian, known as ‘the father of English local history’), John Bagford provided one of the first summaries of the archaeology of Roman London including a detailed description and illustration of a Roman moulded brick found in Mark Lane some 28 feet beneath the pavement. The brick was at the time of writing
one of the curiosities to be found in the collections of the Royal Society in Fleet Street. It was men like Conyers, Woodward and Bagford, amateur collectors and recorders, who laid the foundations for the study of the archaeology of the city which ultimately led to the founding of the Guildhall Museum, but not before a whole new set amateur experts had taken on the baton in the 19th century.