London

Preface
I am delighted to introduce a book that gives all of us a great deal of pride.
At the Museum, our task is to reflect London back to Londoners. We have a collection of over 3
million artefacts, images and recordings - large enough in itself, but small when you consider that
these are supposed to represent the experiences of the many millions of people who have shaped
and been shaped by London over the centuries. Our task is impossible, but compelling.
This book has presented a similar challenge. Distilling the story of our city down to 350 pages,
balancing detail and overview, doing justice to new stories as well as old, has not been easy - but
it has been highly enjoyable. Our hope is that this book will stimulate all its readers, encouraging
them to explore for themselves the fanscinating web of stories that London offers. Our choice has
been to tell the story of London thematically so that, as well as following the capital’s history
chronologically down to the present day, the reader can explore the developing stories of London
art, trade, crime, immigration and books - and many other distinct strands - through the centuries.
Illustrating these interwoven stories are the unique pictures, objects and reconstructions from our
collection, as well as many new maps specially created for this project.
This collaboration with Penguin comes at an exciting time for the Museum of London. The
Museum opened in 1976 and , like many maturing cultural institutions, we have recently felt the
need to freshen ourselves up. We have been looking critically at the story of London we tell, and
how we can best fit ourselves to the 21 st century. This book is part of this process, as are our
growing presence on the web, our second site in East London(Museum of London, Docklands)
and the current redevelopment of our original London Wall site.
The last of these, the biggest alteration to the museum since 1976, will be completed in 2010,
when visitors will find an entirely new suite of galleries exploring London from the Great Fire to
the present day. It is a very exciting project for us, and I hope that this book will whet the
appetites of readers and encourage them to come and see it for themselves.
Many people helped bring this project to fruition. Among those external to the Museum, special
thanks are due to Simon Hall for project management. At Penguin, Georgina Laycock( and before
her Nigel Wilcockson) has been constantly supportive.
From the Museum of London staff, the biggest thanks are due to the team of writers in our two
curatorial departments, run by Cathy Ross and John Clark. Many members of staff did Penguin
duty over the course of the project, compiling material and writing about their own areas of
expertise - including some who spread identify the author or authors. Caroline Juby and Danielle
Schreve of Royal Holloway, University of London, also contributed to the chapter on Prehistory.
PRELUDE: LONDON’S PAST REDISOVERED
Londoners have always had a sense of their city’s history, but systematic investigation began only
in the 17th century and true archaeology only in the mid-20th.
Stukeley’s map pf Roman London, 1724
The antiquarian William Stukeley’s map was based on traditional literary sources and included
a good deal of conjecture. Nonetheless, it was the first serious attempt to map the city’s Roman
past.
In the 5th century AD Roman Londinium lay in ruins and a new people, the Anglo-Saxons,
farmed the countryside around. They had no use for towns; they did not build in stone. What did
they make of the ruins that littered the landscape? Later poets were to romanticize them as ‘the
work of giants’, but as a new Saxon town Lundenwic grew up to the west of the Roman city, as
links were established with Christian Europe and the remains of the Roman empire there, many
people were aware of the history behind the romance. A 9th-century Anglo-Saxon bishop described
London: it was, he wrote, ‘built by the skill of the ancient Romans’. In 886 Saxon Lundenwic was
abandoned in its turn, and Londoners moved back inside the still impressive stone walls of
Londinium. There they came into daily contact with the relics of a lost civilisation. Every time
they dug a pit they cane across building foundations, and old road surface or mysterious artefacts.
When they built new stone churches, they built them of stone and tiles taken fron Roman
buildings.
Yet the Roman past disappeared in to a mist of legends. In about 1136 a book claiming to be an
authentic account of the history of Britain before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons burst upon a
startled world. Groffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain was largely fictional, but
was accepted by historians as true for over 400 years. Groffrey told how a party of Trojan
refugees first settled Britain, and named it after their leader Brutus. Brutus founded a capital city
on the Thames, and called it Troia Nova or New Troy. Later, rebuilt by (an equally legendary)
King Lud, it was renamed Kaer Lud and eventually London.
So medieval Londoners saw their city as New Troy. It was said that Brutus had built the Tower
of London 2000 years before the time of William the Conqueror. St Peter’s church on Cornhill
claimed to be the oldest church in the city on the grounds that it was on the site of a cathedral
built by another legendary king, Lucius, in AD 179 - the parishioners may well have been aware
of the massive foundations of the cathedral-like Roman basilica that underlay the area.

From antiquarianism to archaeology

By the end of the 16 th century, historians like John Stow and William Camden were questioning
the veracity of Geoffrey’s ‘British history’. They turned to classical authors for their knowledge
of Roman Britain, and did not at first consider what we would call archaeological evidence.
William Camden suggested( on very shaky grounds) that St Paul’s cathedral stood on the site of a
Roman temple dedicated to the goddess Diana, and other repeated his suggestion during the 17 th
century.