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.
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