Roman builders were hasty at London

Press, 10 February 1986, Page 36

Roman builders were hasty at London

By PHILIPPA MURRAY NZPA-AAP London Rome was not built in a day, so we are told, but the Romans displayed inordinate haste and slapdash when they built a huge civic forum in the heart of London. Excavations at Leadenhall have revealed cracks in walls and subsiding floors, casing doubts on the Romans’ reputation for solid, enduring workmanship. Archaeologists are digging remains of the largestknown Roman bulding north of the Alps, consisting of a basilica and a large forum, or market area.

They said there was clear evidence of floor subsidence of up to 61cm and large cracks in the 1.82 m-thick foundations of the basilica. Cracks of those dimensions would have caused big problems in the upper walls, causing possible gaps of up to 21cm at the top, said officials of the Museum of London, who are in charge of the project.

"Either the engineer responsible for the job had never dealt with such a colossal building before and was unfamiliar with weights and pressures on the foundations, or it was put up in a hurry without proper surveying or inspection of the soil,” the site’s supervisor, Simon O’Connor-Thompson, said. The floor would hardly have passed inspection since it was laid on a levelled site of earlier Roman houses and work-

shops, believed to date from Nero’s reign and built in the wake of Boudicca’s demolition contractors. “Evidence suggests that the job was done by cowboy builders, since the floor soon began to subside and break up, requiring a second and then a third floor to the nave,” he said. The patch-up jobs suggest that the floor sank about 61cm while it was in use. The building, thought to have been constructed about 100 A.D., is. rated the most important dig in the city for many years. The forum-basilica once covered 3.2 ha and probably contained the treasury, law courts, offices and main market. “Sadly though, there are very few written references to Roman Londinium, so we don’t know much about it,” Mr O’Con-nor-Thompson said. The excavations will allow archaeologists to study the early Roman townscape and road system as well as one of the first development sites in London. They hope to discover the construction dates, ground plan and building sequence of the basilica, and investigate the civic offices such as the curia and treasury, which should reveal why London had such a large basilica compared with other northern Roman provinces such as the area around Gloucestershire. Tragically, though, it is a against time, for

the site must be excavated by late September before a new steel and glass office block takes over the ruins.

The owner of the site, the giant insurance group, Legal and General, has given the Museum of London a year’s grace to probe the find.

The project is costing almost half a million pounds — one of the most expensive digs in western Europe — and will all be ripped up for the new office tower.

“This makes the dig all ithe more important because it is our last glimpse of an important Roman civic building in London,” Mr O’ConnorThompson said.

"After all, this was the roots of the city as a great trading centre, as it is now today.

“It is a unique opportunity. You have to remember that the basilica on the hilltop here was probably as dominating a sight as St Paul’s Cathedral is,” he said. The existence of Saxon deposits after the building became a ruin should also throw important light on the Saxon reoccupation of London after about five centuries of urban decay.

By the fifteenth century, Leadenhall was again a civic building, used by the City Corporation as a public market for the wool trade and comparable in importance t to the Z