London is nearly 2,000 years old, founded by the Romans on the North Bank of the Thames. It grew to become the capital of Roman Britain, and its name even comes from this era: Londinium.

But compared to similarly old cities, very little remains. Rome has, of course, the Colosseum, the Forum and much more besides. In Nimes, the Roman arena still hosts events. In Zaragoza, you can visit a huge remaining chunk of a Roman theatre.

London was one of the most important cities in the Roman Empire, but if you want to see its remnants, you really have to work for it. Exploring Roman London will take you into underground car parks, below art galleries, and into church crypts.

It’s all the more rewarding for this. And though they’re often fragmented and require a lot of imagination, there’s plenty of Roman London to discover.

And in recent years, more of it has become accessible to the public than ever before, most of it for free.

This guide covers every Roman site I know of in London. It’s split into four parts: Roman sites in the City of London, a self-guided walking route, sites beyond the City walls, and museums with Roman collections.

Let’s get started!

This blog is part of London’s Museum Guide – a comprehensive guide of 240+ museums across London.

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A very brief history of Londinium

London’s story starts after the Roman invasion of Britain sometime in the 1st century, as a settlement on the north bank of the Thames, roughly where the City of London is today.

They called it Londinium – thought to be a Romanisation of an early Brittonic word. Over the centuries, this morphed into the city’s modern name.

Londinium’s early history was difficult. Roman rule initially faced a lot of resistance and in AD 60 or 61, Boudica and her Iceni forces burned the city to the ground. You can still find a layer of red, scorched earth in archaeological digs across the City: the Boudican destruction horizon, as archaeologists call it.

But Londinium bounced back, and it grew fast. By the end of the 1st century it was the largest city in Britannia. Later, the Romans surrounded the city with a massive stone wall, stretching roughly two miles, that would define the shape of London for over a thousand years.

The city thrived as the heart of Roman Britain until the early 5th century, when the Roman Empire was under threat from invading Barbarian forces. Legions were ordered home from Britain. Londinium was gradually abandoned, stone looted from its buildings and, eventually, a new city built over it.

That’s why so much of Roman London is now underground. Buildings were quarried for stone and then built over, again and again. The Great Fire levelled much of what remained above ground, and the Blitz finished the job. The street level in the City has risen by five to seven metres since Roman times: roughly the height of a two-storey building.

But the footprint of Roman London never fully disappeared. Roads still follow Roman routes. The City’s boundaries still echo those old walls.

And beneath the modern pavement, five to seven metres down, the physical remains of Londinium can still be explored.

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Roman sites in the city of London

A rough map of where Roman Londinium & its major sites sat, against modern London

The modern boundaries of the City of London roughly map onto Roman Londinium. The above map provides a rough outline of how this looked, mapped onto the modern city.

As a result, all of London’s main Roman sites are close together and can be visited in a single day. If you’re looking for a walking route, skip ahead to the interactive self-guided Roman London map.

London Mithraeum (Bloomberg SPACE)

Stop G in my Roman Londinium self-guided walking tour

This is the standout, and one of London’s real hidden gems: the remains of a Roman temple to the god Mithras, known as a Mithraeum.

After the Romans left London in the 5th century, London’s Mithraeum lay forgotten for over a millennia. It was rediscovered in the 1950s during post-war reconstruction, and it caused a sensation.

For decades it sat awkwardly on Queen Victoria Street, relocated from its original position. When Bloomberg built their European HQ on the original site of the temple, they moved it back and created a genuinely brilliant visitor experience around it.

You descend into the basement to explore a gallery of Roman artefacts found during excavation and some cool interactive exhibits about the cult. Then you go and see the temple itself, with an immersive light and sound installation recreating the atmosphere of the original space. It’s eerie, atmospheric and very well done.

Like many of these sites, it’s completely free, and well worth a visit.

Nearest station: Bank

↑ Back to walking route

London’s Roman Amphitheatre

Stop H in my Roman Londinium self-guided walking tour

For centuries, historians assumed Londinium must have had an amphitheatre, but nobody knew where it was.

They found it by accident in 1988, when Museum of London archaeologists dug into Guildhall Yard to prepare for a new art gallery.

You can see what’s left underneath the Guildhall Art Gallery. The display does a good job of helping you to imagine the original structure and its scale, but very little remains. A section of one of the original stone entrance tunnels is still visible, along with parts of the arena’s walls.

At its peak, it could have held around 6,000 to 7,000 spectators.

Back above ground, look for the dark line marked out in the paving of Guildhall Yard above. It traces the oval outline of the amphitheatre beneath your feet.

Free. Nearest station: Bank or Moorgate

↑ Back to walking route

Billingsgate Roman House and Baths

Beneath an office block on Lower Thames Street sits one of the most atmospheric and complete Roman sites in London: the remains of a wealthy private house and its adjoining bathhouse, dating from around AD 150.

First discovered in 1848, the ruins include the walls and courtyard of the house, plus the cold room (frigidarium), warm room (tepidarium) and hot room (caldarium) of the baths. You can see the underfloor heating system (the hypocaust) remarkably well preserved.

It’s visited by guided tours only, with walkways allowing you to look down on the remains. It’s also one of the only sites in this guide that is paid for – it’s around £12 for a guided tour, which run on Saturdays from April to November. You can find dates and book here.

Nearest tube station: Monument

London’s Roman Wall

Roman London spent the first couple of centuries of its existence without a wall – which had devastating consequences in 60 AD when Boudica burned the city to the ground.

By the late 2nd century though, the Roman Empire was growing increasingly unstable. Legions stationed in Britain were often sent over the channel, to fight battles in Gaul or elsewhere. Londinium was increasingly exposed – and so London got its Roman wall.

Built between AD 190 and 225, London’s Roman wall stretched for nearly two miles, one of the largest building projects in Roman Britain. It defined the city’s boundaries for centuries, before it started to grow in medieval times, and the wall was no longer needed. But even now, the old path of the wall still roughly defines the modern City of London.

Many parts of it were demolished for the stone, or to make new streets. The defensive ditches the Romans had dug became public trash heaps. Other parts were simply subsumed by the city. Generations of Londoners lived in slums and houses against the walls; shopkeepers plied their trade.

Around twenty fragments of the Roman wall survive, largely because they were incorporated into newer buildings. Most of them are below modern street level, and freely accessible.

The best places to see London’s Roman wall are:

• The Roman Wall in a car park – close to the junction between London Wall and Moorgate, in an underground car park of all places, is an 11 metre section of the wall. It’s next to pillars 52 and 53 and can be a little tricky to find…
• Tower Hill (stop A in self-guided walking tour), right by the tube station, is one of the most impressive surviving sections of the wall. It’s now also home to a statue of Emperor Trajan, with it’s own interesting history. It’s a bronze cast of a statue from the 1st century AD, which you can see in Naples. This version, though, has a mismatched head – and the statue was allegedly recovered from a scrapyard in Southampton.
• Cooper’s Row – a very short walk from the Tower Hill section of the wall, hidden away behind the Leonardo Hotel, is the largest remaining fragment of the wall.
• City Wall at Vine Street (Stop C) – a small, free museum built into the basement of a student accommodation block, and home to a substantial section of the wall. Worth visiting because of the exhibition, displaying finds from the ditch around the Roman Wall, and explaining which parts of what you can see are Roman versus later additions.
• Barbican gardens (stops I & J) – my personal favourite, because of the layers of history and juxtaposing architecture.Set in the middle of the huge brutalist estate, just a few metres from the medieval church of St Giles’ Cripplegate, are remains of the Roman fort, which formed an important part of the city’s defences.

↑ Back to walking route

The forum & Basilica at Leadenhall Market

Stop E in my Roman Londinium self-guided walking tour

Leadenhall Market is one of the most beautiful buildings from Victorian London – designed by Sir Horace Jones it feels impossibly grand, all ornate vaulted ceilings and deep reds and greens.

But this was also the site of Roman London’s Forum and Basilica – the heart of life in the ancient city.

London’s was especially impressive, unlike anything else in Britain at the time (or in the millennium after). It was so big it would have dwarfed St Paul’s Cathedral, and was the largest building north of the Alps.

Alongside the Basilica would have been the Forum – a large open square that served as a place for people to meet, socialise, and shop.

Very little remains of the Roman Basilica and Forum. It was the centre of public life then, and that continued in later years – there’s been a market on the site of Leadenhall Market since the 15th century. This means that its been built over many times, buried under the ornate Victorian structure.

For years, the best-known surviving fragment was visible in the basement of Nicholson and Griffin’s hairdressers, on the corner of the market and Gracechurch Street: a neatly constructed section of wall with courses of Roman brick, preserved behind glass. Sadly, this closed in 2024.

But there is very exciting news. In early 2025, archaeologists from MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) found a substantial new section of the Basilica’s wall during excavations for a new office building at 85 Gracechurch Street.

There are plans to open this new discovery as part of a new visitor’s centre within the basement of the building. Watch this space.

↑ Back to walking route

The Roman Girl at the Gherkin

Stop D in my Roman Londinium self-guided walking tour

It’s one of London’s most distinctive skyscrapers – one that shoots toward the future rather than harking back to the past. But while construction work was going on at the Gherkin, the remains of a young girl was found.

Aged 13-17, she was buried in the late 4th/early 5th century AD – towards the end of London’s Roman era – in what would have been just outside the edge of town. We don’t know anything else about the girl.

Very little was found with her – no jewellery or coffin, just some fragments of pottery. One of the peculiar things about the finding was that she’s buried by herself, rather than as part of a cemetery.

She spent 12 years in the Museum of London, where archaeologists studied her remains, before being returned to her original resting place.

She was given a full ceremony, including a procession through the streets to the Gherkin. The ceremony followed Roman traditions, as far as we know.

↑ Back to walking route

The London Stone

Stop F in my Roman Londinium self-guided walking tour

This one is a bit peculiar – and we don’t know whether it’s Roman or not.

The London Stone is a large, irregularly shaped block of limestone which was first mentioned in the early 12th century. Its been a source of great interest pretty much ever since – and for centuries it was a tourist attraction in its own right.

There have been many theories about the origin of the London Stone – including that it predates even the Romans, and that it was a sacred object to the druids.

The most commonly cited theory is that it was the central stone from which all distances in Roman Britain were measured – though there isn’t any evidence to support this.

Modern archaeologists think that it likely formed part of the main entrance to a civic building

↑ Back to walking route

Roman remains in the City’s churches

Some of London’s oldest churches were built on top of former Roman sites. This is no coincidence – as Christianity grew in power and popularity and more churches were needed, it made sense to build on existing infrastructure.

In the crypts of these ancient churches you’ll find some of the most intimate and overlooked Roman remains in London. They’re all free to visit (though will appreciate a donation!) and won’t take long to see.

All Hallows by the Tower

Stop B in my Roman Londinium self-guided walking tour

Right next to the Tower of London, All Hallows claims to be London’s oldest church, dating back to the 7th century. In its crypt museum you’ll find small fragments from a Roman home that was on the site – including its tessellated floor and parts of its wall.

The excellent little museum also has a 1920s model of Roman Londinium and casts of Roman gravestones found in Londinium.

The church has plenty of other claims to fame – as well as being the oldest church in London, William Penn (founder of Pennsylvania) was baptised here; John Quincy Adams married here; Samuel Pepys watched the Great Fire of London from its tower. It’s well worth a visit.

Nearest station: Tower Hill

↑ Back to walking route

St Bride’s Church

One of London’s most distinctive churches, St Bride’s is best known for its ‘wedding cake’ appearance. Its crypt is home to sections of a Roman pavement dating to the second century AD.

Nearest station: Blackfriars or City Thameslink

St Magnus the Martyr

The modern London Bridge isn’t much to look at, often disappointing tourists expecting to see the grand Tower Bridge slightly further East. But it’s on the same site Londoners have been crossing the Thames since the city was founded.

St Magnus the Martyr church, on the north side of the bridge, reflects that ancient history.

Firstly, the old pedestrian entrance to the medieval bridge – built in the 12th century to replace the even older Roman one – was built as an archway in the church. You can still walk through that pedestrian archway, the only remaining part of the Old London Bridge.

Even older is the small section of Roman timber, thought to be part of an old Roman wharf.

Nearest station: Monument

Roman Londinium: a self-guided walk

All of Roman Londinium’s main sites can explored in a single walk – one of the best free London walks.

Use the interactive map below to see the route to explore Roman London.

This walking route takes about an hour walking time – but you’ll want to allow a decent amount of time to explore the larger sites, and for any detours. Allow 2-3 hours.

Stops on the route: A: Tower Hill wall · B: All Hallows by the Tower · C: City Wall at Vine Street · D: The Roman Girl at the Gherkin · E: Forum & Basilica · F: The London Stone · G: London Mithraeum · H: Amphitheatre · I & J: Barbican gardens

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Beyond Londinium’s Walls

Roman London was centred on what is now the City of London. But Roman presence in the area did stretch beyond this – not least because Greater London is now so large, it has now subsumed what were once smaller towns.

These are all of the significant Roman sites beyond ancient Londinium.

Crofton Roman Villa, Orpington

This is Outer London’s most significant Roman destination – right on the South Eastern fringes of the city, in Orpington, Bromley. Once the centre of a large farming estate, it was occupied for nearly 250 years from the 2nd to 5th centuries AD. It’s the only Roman Villa you can visit in the entirety of Outer London.

To get there, you can take a train from London Bridge to Orpington (around 15 minutes) – the Villa is a short walk.

The Villa is temporarily closed for renovations, and expected to reopen in Summer 2026 with a state of the art visitor centre. Visit website.

Southwark Mosaics and Mausoleum

Because so much of Roman London has been buried for centuries, new discoveries are being made all of the time.

One finding in recent years is especially exciting – a Roman Mausoleum, with preserved walls and flooring and a stunning central mosaic. There are plans to open all of it up to the public, which will immediately become one of London’s most significant Roman heritage sites.

Southwark was, for centuries, the only part of London that developed south of the Thames, because it was on the site of the ancient London bridge. There’s another interesting piece of Roman heritage, here: in Southwark Cathedral, close to the exit, you can spot a small section of Roman pavement.

St Albans – Roman Verulamium

It’s not in London, but from King’s Cross you can reach St Albans in just 20 minutes. It’s worth noting here because along with London and Colchester, St Albans was one of the main cities in Roman Britain.

The museum exploring the Roman city – the Verulamium Museum – is one of the best explorations of Roman Britain in the country, especially notable for its collection of nearly complete breathtaking mosaics. Verulamium Museum | St Albans Museums

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Beyond these three sites there are few visible reminders of Roman Britain left in London. A couple of sites that hark back to the time and might be of interest are:

• Watling Street – one of the most important roads of Roman Britain, connecting Londinium to St Albans. It’s the very same road that Boudica took on her path to destroy both cities. Now, it’s a modern A-Road, including Kilburn High Road. Recently archaeologists found a small section of the original Roman road, confirming that the modern road almost exactly follows the original.
• Reuse of Roman stone – After the Romans left Britain, their buildings were left to slowly fall into ruin. Rather than let all that good stone go to waste, medieval buildings often recycled Roman building materials, so in a few spots you’ll find Roman brickwork in later buildings. One interesting example is Old St Andrew’s Church in Kingsbury, a medieval church in West London, quite some distance from Londinium – suggesting a Roman settlement in the area.
• Roman Temple in Greenwich Park – In the Eastern part of Greenwich Park, a plaque and information board marks the site of a Romano-Celtic temple – a temple which would have combined Roman religion with Celtic worship and traditions. It’s now just a patch of grass, but an interesting spot to imagine the fusion of Celtic and Roman cultures that took place on the banks of the Thames, and can easily be combined with a visit to Greenwich’s museums.

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Museums to see artefacts from Roman London

Beyond these living history and archaeological sites, there are a number of museums with extensive collections from Roman London. The best museums to learn about the Roman city are:

• The London Museum – reopening in 2026 as a state of the art museum of the history of London. Free to visit, it will include the museum’s vast Roman collection, including some astonishing mosaics.
• The British Museum – It’s often joked that there’s nothing British in the British Museum. But the museum is home to an excellent collection dedicated to Roman Britain – much of it from Roman Londinium. Some of the highlights include a bronze head of Hadrian, found in the River Thames, and a rare early Christian mosaic.
• Gunnersbury Museum – a large local museum in Gunnersbury Park, which exhibits remains from the small Roman town in the area.
• Other local museums also often showcase local finds. One of the most notable is the Museum of Enfield (Dugdale Arts Centre). This part of North London had one of the larger concentrations of Roman burials – and in the museum you can see a Roman coffin.

Read more London museum guides

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