London Under Read Free

shrouds had been laid in rows. Below these were Roman remains and pieces of Roman pavement. Beneath these Wren found sand and seashells.Ludgate Hill had once been under the sea.
    A trackway from theBronze Age has been found on theIsle of Dogs. Gravel streets from the Anglo-Saxon period follow the course ofMaiden Lane andShorts Gardens,Floral Street and King Street; the houses alongDrury Lane were 39 feet long, 18 feet wide. The bustling life persists, but the evidence for it has gone under the ground. We are treading upon our ancestors. As soon as the original city was built above the ground it began to sink. As it descended beneath the earth ground-floor rooms were transformed into basements, and the front door became the door to the cellar; the first floor was then the street level. The oldest of these remains now lie some 26 feet beneath the surface. The whole history of the city is compressed to little less than 30 feet.
    When the valley ofthe Fleet river was being cleared in the middle of the nineteenth century the pavement of an old street was discovered at a depth of 13 feet; the paving stones had been worn smooth by the passage of traffic and by innumerable footsteps. Below this street were found piles of oak, hard and black, of which the purpose was not clear. A few feet below the oak wereancient wooden pipes, which were essentially the hollowed trunks of trees. All these layers of city history were packed so tightly together that they formed a solid mass of clay, gravel, wood and stone. Just at the level of the street, a great number of pins were scattered. Whether they were hairpins, or sewing pins, the sources do not reveal.

    Excavation of a Roman pavement in Walbrook in 1869 (illustration credit Ill.2)
    There have in fact been stray discoveries of underground London over the centuries.John Stow, in the sixteenth century, reports the discovery of the shank-boneof a “monstrous” man who stood at a height of 10 or 12 feet. It was found within St. Paul’s Churchyard among other bones. It seemed to Stow, therefore, that tales about a race of giants inhabiting the earth were actual truth. It is clear that these “gyants’ bones” were in fact those of a mammoth. It is sufficient to note the fact that there were considered to be marvels buried under the ground.Coins and smallstatues were always being found but, according to the law of the land, “treasure hid in the earth and found shall belong to the Crown.” In the medieval period there was little interest in what lay beneath, except as a possible home for buried treasure. The underworld was otherwise the domain of demons, and should not be touched. The first Englishmen to conduct proper archaeological studies,John Aubrey andWilliam Stukeley, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively, decided to concentrate on more visible sites such as Stonehenge and Avebury. Stukeley did find evidence of JuliusCaesar’s camp byOld St. Pancras Church, and traced the line of Roman roads through eighteenth-century London; but that was the extent of his interest. The city was in any case expanding so rapidly, extending in all directions, that no real attention was paid to the subterranean world. In a period of exponential growth, the past does not exist.
    Yet it was there. In 1832 a colossal head of the emperor Hadrian was retrieved from the Thames in which it had been buried for 1,700 years. In 1865 a gang of workmen,digging beneath the surface ofOxford Street, found a curious trap-door. They opened it and were astonished to find a flight of sixteen brick steps. They followed them and “entered a room of considerable size.” The walls were built of red brick, with eight arches originally designed to let in the light. In the middle of the chamber was a pool or bath, about 6 feet in depth. It was half-full of water, and a spring could still be seen bubbling up. It was in all probability a Romanbaptistery in which the water still flowed from a tributary ofthe