Caroline Lawrence's Top Roman Sites in London

A few days ago, a fan of my Roman Mysteries books emailed to ask which places I would recommend for a visit to the nation’s capital. It’s a good question. London has been almost continuously occupied since the paleolithic period and is crammed with history including a myriad of goodies from the four centuries of Roman occupation. There is history everywhere, especially in the City of London, the square mile that is now the financial district but once housed the Roman fort and port. These are my top half dozen Roman-related sites. Incidentally, they are all free of charge! 

1. The British Museum 
If you only have time for one stop, make it this one. I use it as a kind of club to meet overseas visitors. I go there at least once a month and take fans to the Roman Life Room (69) and also room 70. If you have time, check out the Roman Britain room (49) & the Enlightenment Gallery, where you can touch an exact replica of the Rosetta Stone.
Tip: Go in the back way, via Montague Place; they are now doing bag searches and you will avoid the worst queues. 
Related blog: The Riddle of the Roman Vase

2. Museum of London 
London’s other great museum will soon be moving to Old Smithfields Market and might have a train passing through it. At the time of writing it is near St Paul’s tube station in the Barbican. There is a wonderful section devoted to Roman London. 
Tip: Look out for bits of London’s Roman wall outside and indeed, all over the City of London. 
Related blog: Visualising Roman London

3. The Victorian & Albert 
Did you know you can see Trajan’s column in London? It’s a plaster cast, but still gives you a good view and lovely detail. Go up to the viewing gallery while they are refurbishing the cast gallery. Michelangelo’s David is also there. Yes, it’s Renaissance not Roman, but still worth visiting.
Tip: Visit the tea rooms across the courtyard and marvel at their beauty. 
Related blog: Trajans Column at the V&A

4. Petrie Museum 
Not far from the British Museum in the maze of UCL (University College London) is this delightful gem of a museum. Egypt was important in Roman times and you can see many Roman era artefacts on display. Look out for ancient fabric, palm leaf sandals, charms for turning away evil and portraits of some Romans who lived there. It is open from 1-5 on Tuesdays through Saturdays.
Tip: combine this with a visit to the British Museum nearby. 
Related blog: Roman Egypt at the Petrie

5. The Thames Foreshore
If you are brave, descend steep steps on the north side of the Thames beside the Millennium Bridge. Wear Wellingtons or sturdy boots and gloves. Go at low tide and you will be amazed at the artefacts literally covering the foreshore, including lots of Roman brick. If you are very lucky you might find a Roman hairpin, votive figurine or coin. You can keep anything you see on the surface. This is called ‘Mudlarking’
Tip: Don’t touch anything you pick up with bare hands until you’ve washed it. 
Related blog: Mudlarks on the Foreshore

6. The Roman Amphitheatre 
Like most of Roman London, the amphitheatre is underground, below street level. Access is free via a lift in London’s Guildhall Gallery. If you look across the guildhall courtyard you can see the location of the amphitheatre marked out in different coloured paving stones, like an intentional urban crop mark. Down below, only a few fragments remain of the stone amphitheatre that replaced the wooden one, but there is a stylised indication of seating and competitors.
Tip: Plan your visit to coincide with the next re-enactment of Roman games.  
Related blog: Gladiator Fun Facts

P.S. A new restaurant serving ancient Roman food is due to open later this month near Fenchurch Street. I will report on Roma’s ambience and cuisine on 9 October 2016. 

If YOU have a fave London site with a Roman or Classical association, please leave it in the comments section below... 

Caroline Lawrence’s book The Roman Quests: Escape from Rome, is partly set in Roman London, AKA Londinium. 

London's Burning by Lydia Syson

Of course I should have brought binoculars.  Vast though it was - this panoramic wooden sculpture of London’s mid-seventeenth-century skyline, rising from a flat barge in the middle of the Thames - it looked worryingly far away.  And there was a boat in the way.

As you can see, Sunday was a dull, grey afternoon.  We had pitched up absurdly early, friends and family, hoping to find a good spot on the riverbank, which we did.  Armed with a small picnic and some wine, we leaned against the very comfortable wall in front of the Sea Containers Building, watched the world and the water go by, and caught up on life. It was almost three hours before the burning was due to begin.  But I’m a committed queue-er.  I'm used to  sitting for hours by the river outside the Globe theatre to secure my favourite stage-side groundling view and conversation and good cheer always make the minutes slip by with amazing speed. Our previous experience of Artichoke public art events had convinced us it would be well worth the wait. 

The finale of the 350^thanniversary commemorations of the Great Fire of London - previewed in part here by fellow History Girl Imogen Robertson – was promised to be spectacular.  Hundreds of young Londoners - schoolchildren and young people 'not in education, employment or training' - had collaborated over months to bring to life American ‘burn artist’ David Best’s vision of the Restoration capital. 

London 1666, David Best, London's Burning,
a festival of arts and ideas for Great Fire 350.
Produced by Artichoke.
Photo by Matthew Andrews.

The crowds gathered behind us…we got talking to a few strangers…and joyous anticipation  flickered and caught hold.  Even the security guard who had to run along the sandy shoreline below us in pursuit of a few triumphantly stray spectators was kind and good-humoured as he retrieved them. Free public art brings peculiar health-and-safety headaches and London 1666 was ambitious: fire and water on top of unpredictable audience numbers.  The Great Fire 350website certainly suggested a slight anxiety about overcrowding with its insistence that the best views would be online. That seemed unlikely.

As darkness fell, we saw the dome of St Paul’s begin to move, washed with smoke and colour and finally flames: the beginning of ‘Fires Ancient’, a projection by Martin Firrell.  

From Martin Firrell's website.

Out on the river, pinpricks of torchlight moved about the framework of the small city, only to vanish.  Last checks, we assumed, and worried a bit about getaways.  A few pleasure craft seemed to be cutting it fine.  On the dot of half-past eight, the first spark appeared, right at the heart of the sculpture.

 

From the other side of the river...as it started.
London 1666, David Best, London's Burning,
a festival of arts and ideas for Great Fire 350.
Produced by Artichoke.
Photo by Matthew Andrews.

Just as it had in the city itself 350 years earlier, fire soon took hold and slowly spread.  Little by little, the exquisite intricacy of the sculpture’s latticework construction stood out ever more blackly against the flames, perfectly visible.  

London's Burning, as above, photo by Oliver Rudkin

A brief, southerly gust of wind, and we felt the heat of it on our faces. At first I thought I’d imagined its warmth, but then it came again, and it was even warmer.Building after building caught light, spire after spire. The crackling intensified.  It had begun like the sound of rain pattering on a hard roof – the kind of summer shower you don’t notice until you look outside and run outside to gather in washing.  Soon it sounded vengeful. The entire barge was alight. 

As above.

The clouds of smoke rushing upwards and eastwards developed an alarming but enchanting underbelly of embers, an abundance of golden sparks.  

The fire-fighting boat which had been hovering nearby moved swiftly in to direct a cooling jet of spray at the danger.

I no longer wanted binoculars.  It felt pointless even to take photographs, yet also impossible not to make an attempt, at least from time to time.  No image, moving or still, could possibly convey the complete experience of a performance like this – sounds, smells, sights and that invigorating sense of mass pleasure all combining to provide a extended magical moment, the more magnificent for being shared with so many. There were gasps as the larger structures collapsed, one after another, spires folding and beams breaking. At one point somebody tried and failed to set off round-singing - "London's burning, London's burning..." Mostly people stood mesmerised, from time to time confiding their wonder in low voices.  This was wonder laced with horror. The spectacle - a visual oxymoron, perhaps - lasted for almost three-quarters of an hour. It was the ultimate in twenty-first-century urban sublime. 

Yesterday morning I was working nearby and couldn’t resist stealing away along the Embankment to see what, if anything, remained.  

Nothing.  The barge had vanished, leaving thoughts and memories.  

Something I learned this year was that on September 6^th1666, London was a city of refugees: 80 per cent of the City had lost their homes. The rich rebuilt, but the destitute had to survive for years in shanty-towns on the outskirts of London. There will be events today in central London to commemorate this aspect of the Great Fire, and think about contemporary resonances. 

I’m also left remembering my very first introduction to the Great Fire – a lit-up scale model made for the old London Museum (originally housed in Kensington Palace) - and the memorable awe this always inspired when I went to see it as a young child.  As I got older, I noticed its flaws – the cotton wool smoke, the boy caught implausibly running through a flame.  But when Imogen wrote last month that she felt sorry for people born in London, as they could never have the pleasure of visiting the capital for the first time, it made me laugh. We're happy with that! I’m a Londoner, a proud Londoner, and brought up by several generations of Londoners too. The whole city was my playground, as it is now my children’s, and I was always blessed with older relatives who had long delighted in being Londoners.  They shared its secret spots and stories with me and my siblings and cousins, and untiringly took us up the Monument and St Paul's and on the river and in and out of the City's churches, squares, museums and parks. I’m thanking my family now. 

Photo by Oliver Ruskin, details above.

PS.  Some children's fiction thoughts for the Fire of London: Two of my sons were particularly gripped by Pippa Goodheart's Raven Boy.  My daughter read and re-read Mary Hooper's At the sign of the Sugared Plum and its sequel Petals in the Ashes to the point of obsession. Any other suggestions?

www.lydiasyson.com

Textures & textiles of Scottish Artists by Janie Hampton

Queen Victoria was brought up reading the novels of Walter Scott and after her first trip to Scotland in 1842, she became besotted with this part of her kingdom, promoting Highland cattle, tartans and bagpipes. On show at the Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, is a selection of Scottish paintings from the royal collection. I skidded past the misty landscapes that could have been in my great aunt's spare room. The paintings that caught my eye were those dominated by clothes.

The full length portrait of George III (1738-1820) by Alan Ramsay (1713-1784) is a superb example of textile and texture. You can see, and almost feel, the gold brocade jacket and breeches, shiny shoes and smooth white silk stockings of the king's coronation costume. You want to stroke the soft ermine lining the voluminous cloak draped around his shoulders. (How many hundreds of winter stoats (mustela erminea) died to make it?) The 23 year-old king is standing, tall and imposing, on a fabulous Persian carpet, beside soft velvet curtains with golden tassels. His legs appear rather long for his small head, but the point of the portrait was to impress with the sumptuousness of his clothes and textiles. Ramsay made 150 copies of this painting at 80 guineas each (about £150,000 in today's money) for sovereigns, ambassadors and courtiers. He was the first Scot to be made 'King's Painter' and given the title 'Principal Painter in Ordinary'.

Hanging next to him is George's wife, Queen Charlotte (1744-1818) with her two oldest sons. She is depicted as the young, adoring mother of Prince Frederick, later Duke of York, who is sitting on her lap, and Prince George, later George IV, standing at her side. The Duke of York wears a delicious cream silk frock and lace cap. Boys wore 'coats' then until they were 'breeched' at five years old. (Even my uncle, born in 1909, wore frocks until he was five.) Prince George, then about two and half years old, may be in pale blue lace with frills and a satin sash, but he holds a bow to show how manly and fearsome he will become as a king. When she was just seventeen, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was chosen as a suitable wife for the king. It took two weeks to travel from her home in Germany to London, and they were married just six hours after their first meeting. Over the next 20 years she had 15 children. But of the 13 who survived to adulthood, only three produced offspring. Their descendants include all the current European royalty, and, illegitimately, the recent British Prime Minister David Cameron. Charlotte founded orphanages, and was patron of 'Queen Charlotte's Lying-in- Hospital' the first ever maternity hospital. She supported the education of women, including her seven daughters. Ramsay’s talent is shown in the elegance, subtlety and exquisite colouring of this painting, in which he combines the grandeur of a royal portrait with the intimacy of a domestic scene.

In the gallery next door, the full length portrait of  Bonnie Prince Charlie Entering the Ballroom at Holyroodhouse, made me yelp with delight. The painting was executed by John Pettie (1834-93) over a hundred years after the prince's death it was exhibited at London's Royal Academy in 1892. It depicts a moment in 1745 just before Prince Charles (1720-88) marched south unsuccessfully to claim the English throne.

The prince emerges from the shadows into the bright light of the ballroom, with silk ribbons and flowers scattered at his feet. In fact the ball at at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, was invented by Sir Walter Scott in his novel Waverley. My yelp was caused not by his elegant legs clothed in striped socks, nor by the exquisite silk waistcoat which reminded me of the mayor's waistcoat in Beatrix Potter's The Tailor of Gloucester.

Mayor of Gloucester's waistcoat, embroidered by mice.

 It was his kilt that startled me. My family once had a connection with this kilt.  In 1880 my great grandmother, Janie Bruce, died aged 42, leaving 11 children. The six youngest children, including my grandfather Rosslyn, were sent to live in Edinburgh with their great uncle, a bachelor aged 71, called William Forbes Skene. William's father, James Skene, had been Walter Scott's best friend, and William was the first person to write a history of Scotland from the Scots point of view: The Highlanders of Scotland, their Origin, History and Antiquities (1837). Shortly after the arrival of his great nieces and nephews, he was made the Historiographer Royal of Scotland. One day the children were bored and labelled the drawers of an old chest with the names of their dolls. Inside was some old tartan cloth, out of which they made tiny kilts for their dolls, one of whom was a sailor-doll called Gerald. The chest had belonged to Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the old cloth was his kilt. John Pettie and William Skene lived in Edinburgh at the same time and probably knew each other. Did Pettie ever see the real kilt, either before or after its re-cycling?

Prince Charles Edward Stuart tartan,
All tartan was banned after the 1745 rebellion
and only reinstated in Scotland in 1822, 

The paintings in this exhibition were collected between 1750 and 1900 and reflect the distinctive tastes of Georges III, IV and V, and Queen Victoria. All the artists were born in Scotland and the romantic episodes they painted contributed to strengthening Scottish identity.

ScottishArtists 1750-1900.

The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London.

Until Sunday, 9 Oct 2016

www.janiehampton.co.uk

Author Maths, by Y S Lee

The US/Canadian cover (Candlewick Press)

One of the things I find consistently surprising in historical fiction is how very long it takes to get from one place to another. My Mary Quinn Mysteries (called the Agency series, in North America) are set in London between 1858 and 1860. They’re too urban to make use of the railways that criss-crossed the country and a shade too early for the first intra-city underground trains (the Metropolitan Railway opened in 1863). Most of the travel in my novels takes place either on foot or by horse-power: carriages, cabs, and of course, simply riding on horseback. By 1858, there were also horse-drawn omnibuses that, like our present-day buses, plied regular routes through the city. 

The UK/Australian cover (Walker Books)

The climax of Rivals in the City features a fair amount of running around between locations in central London. One of the first things I did when plotting it was create a chart showing the different sites, the distances between them, and how long it would take to move from one point to another. In order not to spoil the plot (Rivals will be published next week in the U. S. and Canada; it’s already available in the UK), I’ve renamed the locations after four of my favourite North American cities. This, of course, is a fiction upon a fiction; the real locations are London landmarks. Otherwise, here’s what my chart looks like:



Timing the final action

Locations	Distance in miles	Walking (in mins)	Running (in mins)	Horseback (in mins)
Vancouver to Toronto	2.7	54	27	22
Toronto to New York	3.2	64	32	25
New York to Montreal	1.9	41	19	16
Montreal to Vancouver	1.9	40	19	16
New York to Vancouver	1	20	10	8

I assumed an average running speed of about 6 miles/10 km per hour - a pretty fast clip for a woman burdened with heavy clothes on slick, inconsistently paved, and poorly lit urban streets (it’s after dark). But I’m talking about the women of the Agency, an elite detective firm. Not only are they are in excellent physical form, they are responding to an emergency.

I assumed a horse trot of 7-8 mph, since poor road quality and night-time visibility again make it impossible to canter. With horseback, I also needed to allow tie-up time and the need to rest or change horses. Riding turned out to be not much faster than running, but riding made it possible for a character to arrive at an important location looking respectable.

As it worked out, the time elapsed for a series of important messages to be relayed was:

- 57 minutes: for a character to run from Vancouver to Toronto and back again

- 41 minutes, plus delays while tying-up a horse: for a character to ride from Toronto to New York, and then from New York to Montreal

- 30 to 35 minutes, plus time for marshalling and instructions: for a large group to walk quickly from Montreal to Vancouver

This left me with a space of 2 ¼ hours, the minimum period during which my heroine, Mary Quinn, would be alone in “Vancouver” after sounding the alarm. It turned out to be the perfect window of time to allow her to take action, imperil herself, yet receive help at just the right moment.

I love this kind of concrete plotting, and wonder if any of you do the same. How do you work out timelines, near-misses, and rescues?
--
Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries (Walker Books/Candlewick Press), a quartet of novels featuring a girl detective in Victorian London. Rivals in the City, the last in the series, is published in the US and Canada on March 10.

Maps and Chaps - Celia Rees

When I was at school, this was how one of my teachers defined Geography and History. Of course, the scope of both subjects expands far beyond this narrow definition (what about Chapesses?) and neither are they mutually exclusive. I don't know about other History Girls, but I spend an enormous amount of time poring over maps. I have them in my notebooks, pinned to my noticeboard. They allow me to track my characters' journeys and to get to know the places where they are living. 

In Sovay, the journey was from the English Midlands (it was possible to us a modern map for this - avoiding the M40) to 18th Century London and then to Revolutionary Paris. 

Just looking at the maps is exciting, an adventure in itself. The lettering, the illustration, the way the maps are set out, give a feeling for the time when they were created. The maps differ from period to period, just as countries and counties change and cities grow and develop. The 18th Century maps I referred to for Sovay, are very different from those that I looked at for The Fool's Girl, set two hundred years earlier.

Vissher Panorama

Agas map

The Agas map gives a unique bird's eye view of the Elizabethan city and the Vissher Panorama is just that, a panorama in almost photographic detail. A magnifying glass reveals tiny, accurate  visual details, not just of landmarks but of the everyday life of the people going about their business, where they would be going, what they would have seen and witnessed, all this is a priceless resource to the writer.


Useful as maps are, there is really no substitute for visiting a place, following the streets and alleyways of the old cities makes it much easier to imagine your character there, to bring the place and the period to life. Much of what was marked on the historical map will have been swept away by the intervening centuries, by fire, war, continuous and continuing development, but some things remain. When I'm walking a town or a city, or travelling though a landscape, I remember fellow History Girl, Adele Geras' advice to write about what is still there, rather than what has disappeared. It is always possible to find an old building, a cobbled courtyard, a narrow alleyway that holds something of the period that you are hoping to discover.

In Peter Ackroyd's London: A Biography, he describes a continuity of use that can stretch back for many centuries. A walk along modern Bankside won't show much that is left from Shakespeare's day but there are pubs, theatres, restaurants, street performers and beggars, the vibrant life of the river, different vessels on the choppy waters, the rubble strewn foreshore, a cormorant drying its wings. Much has gone, but some things are still there.

A page from The Fool's Girl Notebook

Celia Rees
www.celiarees.com