Free Under Another Sky by Charlotte Higgins

a persistent myth that Boudica is buried beneath platform eight of King’s Cross railway station. None of this has the least foundation, but I enjoy the accretion of story – like a thickening in the air. In the early nineteenthcentury, industrial, filthy Battle Bridge was notorious as a haunt of low-lifes and criminals. And so, when the area was redeveloped in 1830, in an attempt to banish all the unpleasant associations of the past it was renamed King’s Cross, after ‘a ridiculous octagonal structure crowned by an absurd statue of George IV’, according to Walter Thornbury’s 1878 history,
Old and New London
. That structure – which at various times contained a police station and a public house – was pulled down in 1845, and so there is no longer a king’s cross at King’s Cross. I prefer one of the other names that was mooted in 1830 and discarded: Boadicea’s Cross.
    If Londinium was burned almost at its birth, it now reveals itself only through London’s destruction. When Christopher Wren set to work remodelling the City – which had been rendered, as he put it, a ‘great Plain of Ashes and ruins’ by the 1666 fire – he found a number of Roman remains, including ‘the most remarkable Roman Urns, Lamps, Lacrymatories and Fragments of Sacrificing-vessels, &c’ near Cheapside. When he was working near Ludgate, a tombstone set up to one Vivius Marcianus by his wife Januaria Martina was dug up: it can now be seen in the Museum of London. On the site of St Paul’s, according to his son’s memoir, Wren found ‘to his Surprise … a Roman Causeway of rough Stone … He concluded then to lay the Foundation of the Tower upon the very Roman Causeway, as most proper to bear what he had design’d, a weighty and lofty Structure’. He searched in vain for the temple to Diana, or Apollo, that reputedly lay beneath the burned-out ruins of the old St Paul’s. ‘Having rummaged all the Ground thereabouts, and being very desirous to find some Footsteps of such a Temple, I could not discover any,’ he wrote.
    Wren wanted to build a rational city, in spirit like the regularly gridded Londinium: he envisaged a central piazza radiating streets like a sunburst, with the Exchange at its centre, ‘the Building to be contriv’d after the Form of the Roman Forum, with double Porticos’. But he was thwarted by ‘the obstinate Averseness of a great Part of the Citizens to alter their old Properties’. Not for the first time, London resisted rationalisation: no new Rome was to be built here. Even on Roman Londinium’s grid, laid out with sergeant-majorish precision, archaeologists have found the foundations of British roundhouses. Not everyone, it seems, wanted flat-fronted. As Nikolaus Pevsner wrote in his 1957 architectural guide to the cities of London and Westminster,the City’s keynotes were, and remain, ‘ever-recurring contrasts of tall and low, of large and small, of wide and narrow, of straight and crooked, the closes and retreats and odd leafy corners’. At least the improving Wren was allowed to build St Paul’s, he said, ‘after a good Roman manner’.
    There is a map of Londinium, published by the Museum of London. The Roman city’s streets and buildings are all marked, as far as they are known, which is incompletely. Roman towns are predictable. From Spain to Syria they came with a more or less full complement of forum, basilica, baths, amphitheatre, theatre. When Londinium’s amphitheatre was discovered under the Guildhall in 1988, the surprise was that it had been located, not that Londinium turned out to have had one. On the map of Londinium there are large gaps. But you can be sure there are Roman things in these lacunae, perhaps tunnelled through by sewers or Tube lines, or crushed out of existence by London’s foundations, rooting down. Or perhaps still intact, waiting to be discovered by some fracture of the city’s surface. On the museum’s map, Londinium is shown in solid black lines.