To view the reconstructions you will need London: The greatest city
The Romans in London
Surprisingly, the first people to grasp the importance of London's unique location weren't locals at all, but foreigners. In AD 43, the Romans landed on the south coast of England and marched up the Thames estuary until they reached the site of modern London.
Boundary between tribes
'When the Romans arrived in the London area in the middle of the 40s AD,' says historian Guy de la Bédoyère, 'they found nothing like a town, no settlement of tribal people. They found a river valley that was tidal, swampy, marshy inlets around the river banks, a lot of forest and, in the distance, smoke rising from scattered native farmsteads.'
The locals were farmers and fishermen. For them, the river was simply a boundary between the territories of different tribes. But to the Romans' acute commercial minds, this stretch of water had great potential. Their contribution to the history of London would be to transform a deserted swamp into Britain's premier city.
The mighty Thames
The Thames here was tidal, narrow enough to be bridged and deep enough for ships to sail all the way up from the coast. A port here would open up the whole region north of the Thames to trade and connect Britain to the rest of Rome's global empire.
'If you look at the origins of London as a Roman city on a river, a trading city,' says writer Robert Elms, 'it almost foretells the next 2,000 years of its history. Because what you've got is a city formed by outsiders. It's not formed as a seat of government or as a place with great mineral wealth or agriculture. It's there simply because it's the best place to trade. This mighty river, the Thames, is a perfect place of confluence, of coming and going.'
Around AD 50, the first London was born. A visitor from the south would have seen a modest settlement of wooden buildings clustered around a bustling waterfront. In the early days, it had no walls or fortifications and was a sitting target for the Romans' many enemies.
Boudica
The local tribes were seething with resentment against their Roman oppressors. Their grievances ranged from huge taxes to general brutality. In AD 60, the Britons rebelled. Their leader was the ruler of one of the eastern tribes: Queen Boudica.
According to the Roman historian Tacitus, she hated the Romans because, after the death of her husband, they had stolen her land, raped her daughters and flogged Boudica herself.
The feisty queen's call to arms was spoken in a Celtic language similar to modern Welsh:
Consider how many of you are fighting and why, then you will win this battle or perish. That is what I as a woman plan to do. Let the men live in slavery if they will.
The rebels' plan was simple: attack and destroy the Romans' most important settlements. Colchester, in the east, was swiftly wiped out, and the Britons moved on to London. The timing of the attack couldn't have been better – the Roman army was away, crushing an uprising in Wales.
Burning London
'When the Boudican revolt burst into London,' says Guy de la Bédoyère, 'the rebels were bent on annihilating everything they could find. They burnt every building they could get their hands on, razing it to the ground. Archaeologists have discovered a thick burnt layer deep under the ground, marking that first great fire of London.'
The fire that destroyed the town was so fierce that it melted bronze coins. The entire 40 acres of early London was burnt to the ground. Every man, woman and child was slaughtered. The desperate Britons hacked off Roman heads and threw the skulls in the river. Their brutality was described by the Roman historian Tacitus.
Seventy thousand Romans and their allies were thought to be dead, for the Britons didn't capture or sell prisoners, or engage in other wartime exchanges. They cut throats, lynched, burnt and crucified with ruthless abandon.
But the Britons would pay for their savagery. The vastly superior Roman army returned from Wales and quickly re-established control. The rebellion was brutally crushed.
Boudica's fate is unknown. Some writers claim she fell sick and died, others that she committed suicide to avoid capture. But her legend survived. Today she is celebrated in a sculpture on the banks of the Thames as the first great British nationalist.
The Roman London Bridge
As for London, its natural advantages made it too important to abandon. One of the reasons the Romans had chosen this site in the first place was that the Thames here was narrow enough to cross. And some time during the first century AD, they built a wooden bridge only 25 metres (82 feet) from the present London Bridge. For 1,600 years, this was the site of the only bridge across the Thames. The Romans had also built a network of major roads, all leading to London.
After the uprising, the Romans made sure the town was properly defended. They built a huge wall 2.7m (9ft) wide, 5.5m (18ft) high and nearly two miles long – a wall so strong that sections of it have survived for 1,700 years.
The golden age
Only 20 years after the Boudican revolt, the town would enter its first golden age. 'London was commercially important in its unique setting on the Thames and at the centre of a communications hub,' says Guy de la Bédoyère. 'So the Romans set about an enormous rebuilding programme, to restore their pride, if nothing else. This now became a full-scale miniature Rome.'
At the heart of the city was the forum: shopping mall, administrative centre and law court rolled into one. Dominating the forum was a huge basilica, the largest in northern Europe and proof of how important London had become. Here native Britons mingled with merchants from all corners of the empire. Even this early in its history, London – unlike the rest of Britain – was already a melting pot.
'It would have been a city full of people from all over what was then the known world,' says Robert Elms. 'Iberians and Gauls, people from Africa, Jewish people – a little microcosm of the Roman empire. And that's what it's been ever since: a trading place, a place of arrival, cosmopolitan, polyglot. A world city.'
The Romans' seduction
After the mistakes of the early years, the Romans had come up with a new plan for taming the Britons. This time they replaced coercion with seduction. The natives were to be softened up with magnificent public buildings, hot baths and lashings of olive oil.
'After the Boudican revolt,' says Guy de la Bédoyère, 'the Roman policy seems to have been one of integration, making it possible for quite ordinary people to buy their way into the whole Roman way of life. That's a little bit like a modern imperial Western power – handing over consumer goods like footballs and video recorders to a Third World country as a kind of political tool. Almost a kind of commercial enslavement.'
The Roman plan worked. Rich Londoners took to wearing togas and learned to read and write in the official language of Latin. On a piece of Roman tile found on a modern-day London building site, a worker has scrawled a complaint about a mate who hasn't turned up for work:
Austalis has been going off by himself every day for 13 days.
'This shows us straight away that this ordinary tile worker didn't just have Latin, he'd even learned to write in Latin verse,' says Guy de la Bédoyère. 'The fact that such a worker can write his sneery comment about a colleague in Latin tells us that the whole Roman ethos has been assimilated right the way throughout the social spectrum.'
A new wave of invaders
But London's fortunes were linked to the Roman empire's. By the 3rd century AD, Rome was riven by in-fighting and besieged by its barbarian enemies. And as Rome declined, so did London. In AD 410, the city was abandoned by the Romans, and southern England was over-run by a new wave of invaders from northern Europe.
These Anglo-Saxons had no interest in city life. Like the ancient Britons before them, they preferred to live in small villages. As the Dark Ages descended on Europe, the curtain fell on the glory that was once Roman London. The city would take over 400 years to recover.
