"Pompeii of the North" Last night we went to the excellent “Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum” exhibition at the British Museum. Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed by the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in AD79. At the same time, many of the buildings in the cities, and their contents, were preserved under a layer of volcanic rock, and now provide an extraordinary record of ordinary life in the early Roman world. On a related note, London now has its own version of Pompeii, “the Pompeii of the North”, unearthed during recent excavations undertaken by Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) at the three-acre Bloomberg site west of the street of Walbrook. A number of significant structures have been identified at the site, which in Roman times fronted onto the now long-lost Thames tributary also known as the Walbrook. In addition, many thousands of artefacts have been recovered, including many made of organic materials that would normally have perished but that were preserved in the abnormal anaerobic conditions of the waterlogged deposits of the Walbrook. The Walbrook site, which also includes the “Temple of Mithras” that came to light after the bombing of the Second World War, is visited on our Friday afternoon “Tower to Temple” walk. The nearby site of the Roman Governor’s Palace substantially underneath Cannon Street station is also visited on our Friday afternoon walk. A special themed walk on “Roman London” is available on request.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 19:47:35 +0000
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