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The ancient corner of London that’s scandalously overlooked by tourists

City of London - Alexander Spatari/Moment RF
City of London - Alexander Spatari/Moment RF

When guiding in the City of London at weekends I often see little family groups, dwarfed by glass and steel skyscrapers, looking around them in bewilderment. Where’s Big Ben? Where are the theatres? Where are the lights? Where is everyone?

Well, everyone’s at home. It’s the weekend. Only about 8,000 or so of the 500,000 people who work in the City (I’m talking pre-pandemic) actually live here. For this is not the city in general, it’s the City, capital C, the old City, and despite being almost 2,000 years of age, twice as old as Westminster, it doesn’t really do tourism.

Now that’s about to change. The City of London Corporation, presiding over a financial centre that in terms of depth and maturity has few serious global rivals bar Wall Street, has emerged from the triple whammy of 2008, Brexit and Covid with the conviction that it’s time to share its famous Square Mile with the general public.

It has announced a £2.5 million investment in a Destination City programme, aimed particularly at families and, for the first time, really exploring its magnificent Roman past. Many Londoners don’t know that large chunks of our Roman wall still exist, that the remains of a full-scale Roman amphitheatre lurk under the Guildhall Art Gallery and that you can visit a Roman bath house excavation near Billingsgate.

Or that the Brutalist housing complex occupied by most of the City’s residents is called the Barbican because it sits on the old Roman fort, or that the road to Old London Bridge, originally Roman, skims the front door of St Magnus the Martyr.

The Barbican, City of London - Jchambers/iStockphoto
The Barbican, City of London - Jchambers/iStockphoto

The Telegraph has learned that Tim Powell, the acclaimed creator of the Lost Palace of Whitehall ‘resurrection’ in 2017 and the Gunpowder Plot immersive show that opened today (without a bang, obviously) at the Tower of London, is involved in working out exactly how to use immersive technology to bring Londinium most vividly back to life. Think interactive re-enactments of the Roman Ludi, with the chance to get involved in playful games and quests; activating a series of portals into Londinium across the City, multi-sensory experiences of Roman life; and a monumental installation evoking lost Londinium.

In many ways, the City is well prepared for this. Over the past decade hotels have been popping up all over the place: the Four Seasons London at Ten Trinity Square, The Ned, the pithily named DoubleTree by Hilton London – Tower of London, Apex City of London, and my favourite, Citizen M. Gone are the days when the only five-star hotel was Threadneedles (still charming and still occupying a beautiful old banking hall near the Bank of England), and the only regular visitors were here on business.

There are restaurants everywhere, at all price levels, some of London’s most historic pubs, and cafes in many of the fine old parish churches, which have their own support network, The Friends of The City Churches. There are thoughtfully planted pocket gardens and parks, one of the great joys of the City, and handsome livery halls to see, owned by former trade guilds. Pre-pandemic, even without pushing hard, the City was getting 10 million visitors a year.

City of London - CHUNYIP WONG/iStockphoto
City of London - CHUNYIP WONG/iStockphoto

On the Roman front, when Bloomberg opened its new headquarters in 2017 it gave the City a superb free museum. The London Mithraeum, a subterranean temple used by members of the Roman cult of Mithras, was rescued from post-war obscurity on Queen Victoria Street and returned to its original depth, if not quite the same place.

It has a stunning display of 600 Roman objects, a fraction of the total found by the Museum of London Archaeology (MoLA) excavation during construction, a sound and light show recreating the temple above its foundations, and a ground level art gallery, Bloomberg SPACE, showing contemporary work related to the Mithraeum.

The Museum of London itself, now in the process of moving from London Wall to West Smithfield, has Roman altars and artefacts and the Mithras head and carvings found at the temple site during its 1954 excavation. MoLA itself occasionally hosts public archaeology days by the river, often turning up Roman glass and pottery.

The City of London - Alena Kravchenko/iStock Editorial
The City of London - Alena Kravchenko/iStock Editorial

Half of me is thrilled about Destination City and the other half isn’t. I love the City partly because people don’t know its secrets, even if they’ve worked there, so it all comes as a huge surprise. It’s not exactly pretty, with its muddle of architecture, but it is a survivor; of fires, plagues, bombs, the Big Bang (financial deregulation) and the pandemic. It has an odd integrity, for it is, and always has been, all about the money.

So I like feeling as though I’m in someone else’s school. I like its mad rituals – from the Silent Ceremony when the Lord Mayor of the City of London is sworn in with no speeches, what genius, to the annual sheep drive over London, now Southwark, Bridge. I love its brown and ancient pubs and the boom of voices, 75% male whatever anyone says, from drinkers in Leadenhall Market on Friday afternoons.

But it’s time to share, it’s true. And what better beginning than the Romans?