Londinium, Architecture and the Crafts

by W. R. Lethaby

Fig. 24.

The well mentioned above is one of a great number which have been discovered; for instance, in excavating for Copthall Avenue “a pit or well, boarded, and filled with earthenware vessels,” etc., was found (Builder, October 5, 1889). Such wells with boarding like a long barrel have been excavated at Silchester. Again to the south of Aldgate High Street two wells were found (Builder, May 3, 1884).

The most complete Roman building which has been recovered and planned is one excavated in Lower Thames Street in 1848 and again in 1859 (Builder, February 5, 1848, and June 11, 1859). A restored plan was given in the Journal of the British Archæological Association, vol. xxiv. (see Fig. [21]). The two apsed chambers had hypocausts beneath their floors, supported on little piers built of tiles 8½ in. square, and broken materials. Fig. 25 is reproduced from the illustration of the eastern chamber given in The Builder. Several sketches and some notes, by Fairholt, of this building are in the Victoria and Albert Museum. About 4 or 5 ft. of the walls remained in places, all of tiles with mortar joints nearly as thick as themselves.

Fig. 25.—(A, old masonry; B, brickwork with a flue tile; C, foundations of chamber.)
Foundations discovered in Lower Thames Street in 1859.

“The walls were of red and yellow brick in alternate layers composed of 18 in. tiles.” Outside the walls was “a drain of wooden planks, 18 in. deep by 10 wide, running towards the river” (see plan). The walls were erected on piles. The sketches show some of the box-flue tiles which had impressed patterns (see Fig. [25]). Some additional information is given on a lithograph by A. J. Stothard (1848). The walls were 3 ft. thick. Above the floor of the south room, which was of coarse red and yellow tesseræ, was a second, about a foot higher in level; this was “a layer of red concrete 2½ in. thick, hard, and the upper surface almost glazed” (compare a floor found in Eastcheap, “concrete stuccoed over and painted red.”—V.C.H.). This building was doubtless a house; at the time it was found it was called a bath, but it seems too small to have been even a secondary public bath. As Thos. Wright says: “Many writers have concluded hastily that every house with a hypocaust was a public bath” (cf. the plan of a house at Lymne, The Roman, etc., p. 160). The stoke-hole of the hypocaust was at F, and there were flues up the middle wall and the western apse. The large room was 23 ft. square; some tiles of 2 ft. square were found here, also window glass and an iron key. The plan lay square with the south City Wall (Fig. [24]), and the building can hardly be earlier than this wall. It may thus be accepted as a late fourth-century house, and we may further infer that box-tiles with impressed patterns were a characteristic of this century. On two sides of the house were lanes about 10 ft. wide. As in so many cases modern walls seem to have been laid out on the same alignment as the Roman building.

The house just described had two apses, and the Bucklersbury house also had an apse. This was in agreement with general custom. As Thos. Wright remarked: “One peculiarity which is observed almost invariably in Roman houses in Britain is that one room has a semicircular alcove, and in some instances more than one room possesses this adjunct.” In the plan given in Archæologia of the Roman walls and floors found in and about Lombard Street in 1785 two apses seem to be indicated; thus we have evidence for five in the scanty records; altogether there must have been scores in the city.

Within the walls of the City were many large houses of the villa type as well as minor dwellings and streets of shops. Roach Smith speaks of such great houses about Crosby Square; he also describes a mosaic floor under Paternoster Row which extended 40 ft.; a second important floor on the site of India House, Leadenhall Street, was at least 22 ft. square, and may have been considerably more; a third large floor which was found under the Excise Office, Broad Street, was about 28 ft. square (probably 30 Roman ft.). All these must have been the floors of the chief central rooms of large houses of the villa type. Tite saw this of the Broad Street floor as his speaking of the “triclinium, other rooms, and the garden” shows. This Broad Street pavement was lying square with more modern walls surrounding it, and it may not be doubted that buildings continuously occupied the site.

The supposition that there were important houses of the villa type within the walls of the City has been fully confirmed by the excavations at Silchester, and I may here quote Dr. Haverfield’s general conclusions as to Roman towns in Britain. “Roman British towns were of fair size, Roman London, perhaps even Roman Cirencester were larger than Roman Cologne or Bordeaux. They possessed, too, the buildings proper to a Roman town—town hall, market-place, public baths, chess-board street-plan, all of Roman fashion; they had also shops and temples and here and there a hotel.... The dwelling-houses in them were not town houses fitted to stand side by side to form regular streets; they were country houses, dotted about like cottages in a village. But in one way or another and to a real amount, Britain shared in that expansion of town life which formed a special achievement of the Roman Empire.” The evidence as to the isolation of the houses is here a little overstated, but in the main the passage gives a true impression. Fragments of wall decorations and mosaics found in Southwark suggest that there were big houses on that side of the river, and doubtless others occupied sites along the Strand and Holborn.