Exhibition Details - Page 1 of 3
The
Museum of London’s ground-breaking High Street Londinium exhibition recreates
one small section of Roman London in AD100, using replicas based on surviving
Roman evidence. Visitors can walk through the reconstructions of three
buildings that faced onto Londinium’s via decumana, whilst actors and
craftworkers participate in bringing to life the bustling centre of the
dynamic new town. Afterwards, you can view the display of archaeological
finds from the excavations at 1 Poultry, in the City of London, which
provided the evidence for the exhibition.
The exhibition is of particular value to teachers, since it enables pupils to experience at close quarters how Londoners nearly 2000 years ago would have lived. You are encouraged to touch the reconstructions and replicas, whilst the exhibition also recreates some of the sounds and smells of the town. From a window in one of the shops, a film reconstruction of the passers-by can be seen. The archaeological finds emphasise how historical enquiry is based on evidence, and that historians are constantly up-dating their knowledge to take account of new evidence.
The reconstruction consists of a bakery, a craftworker’s house and a merchant’s shop. Through entering the houses and shops, pupils can discover for themselves that the newly established town was a very different place to the later imperial city usually portrayed in textbooks. There are no great stone buildings, bath houses, central heating or mosaic floors. Instead, in the decades following the establishment of the settlement in AD 50, the inhabitants lived what was essentially a frontier town, their buildings constructed of timber and mudbrick, with floors of flattened earth.
High Street Londinium is based on evidence which was excavated by the Museum of London’s Archaeology Service (MoLAS) during 1994-96 at 1 Poultry. This site lies almost exactly in the centre of the modern City of London. Plans to construct a landmark building to replace the street’s Victorian buildings were approved in 1989. Given the archaeological importance of the site, the developers agreed to construct the groundfloor of the building initially as a massive concrete platform. This enabled MoLAS to excavate the Roman, and later Saxon and Medieval, levels underneath, whilst the new office block was constructed above.
Above: Looking north over the Poultry
dig, a huge triangular-shaped site.
Much of the work took place underground, as the new building rose above.
It was what the dig revealed about Roman London that made it so important archaeologically. The town’s main road, usually referred to as the via decumana, ran east west across the site. To the east of the site, the road crossed the Walbrook stream, whilst a series of smaller roads joined the via decumana at a major junction in the western part of the site. The site’s proximity to the Walbrook stream provided the waterlogged soil conditions ideal for the preservation of organic material such as wood and leather.
After the destruction of early Roman London by Boudica’s revolt in AD60, the town was rapidly rebuilt, and Londinium quickly grew to be a major trading centre. The buildings which lined the via decumana were mostly long and thin, a mixture of houses, shops and workshops. Behind them were yards and outhouses, with narrow alleys running along their sides. The Poultry dig revealed that this was an area principally inhabited by shopkeepers and craftsmen - the first time that it has been possible to characterise a quarter of Londinium with any precision.
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Last modified: Monday, 12 March, 2001