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The Square Mile still follows the street plan the Romans laid down nearly two thousand years ago, and beneath its glass towers sits an entire buried Roman city, gladiatorial arena included.
The City of London, universally known as the Square Mile, began as Londinium, founded by the Romans around 43 AD as a strategic bridging point across the Thames. Its early history was more dramatic than most people realise: the settlement lasted less than fifteen years before Boudica burnt it to the ground during her revolt against Roman rule. It recovered, and by the end of the first century, Londinium had grown into the largest city in Roman Britain.
Londinium's forum basilica was, remarkably, one of the largest structures anywhere north of the Alps by the time Emperor Hadrian visited the city in 122 AD. Most of that Roman city now sits buried beneath the modern financial district, but its footprint never really left: the Square Mile's street plan today still echoes the grid the Romans laid down nearly two thousand years ago.
Walk down almost any street in the Square Mile, and there's a reasonable chance a Roman citizen once walked more or less the same route, following more or less the same lines.
Some of that buried history is genuinely accessible today. The Guildhall Amphitheatre, the remains of London's Roman amphitheatre, lies directly beneath the Guildhall Art Gallery, and visitors can walk through the actual arena floor where gladiators once fought, a startling piece of ancient spectacle sitting quietly beneath a modern civic building.
The London Mithraeum offers an immersive reconstruction of a Roman temple dedicated to the mysterious cult of Mithras, one of the more genuinely atmospheric Roman remains anywhere in the city, rediscovered and now presented to visitors much as it would have looked to the Roman Londoners who once worshipped there.
The original walled city was largely contained within defences roughly contiguous with the modern Square Mile boundary, and fragments of that Roman wall still surface unexpectedly today, along streets like London Wall and in the basement of the Barbican, physical remnants of the boundary that first defined this square mile of London nearly two millennia ago.
Modern visitors mostly know the City for its glass towers and its role as one of the world's great financial centres, but that thoroughly modern identity sits directly on top of, and often literally within, the walls of ancient Londinium. Few places on earth let you move quite this seamlessly between a Roman temple and a 21st-century trading floor within a single afternoon's walk.
The Square Mile rewards visitors willing to look past the glass and steel: walk the Roman street grid, descend into the amphitheatre beneath the Guildhall, and find the temple to Mithras tucked among the office towers. Two thousand years of continuous history are still here, mostly hiding in plain sight, waiting for anyone curious enough to look down as well as up.
The Social Martini is proud to connect the people who live, work, and explore the City of London. 🍸