I was surprised at how much remains to be seen after the passage of 2000 years and major catastrophes such as the Great Fire and the Blitz. It just goes to show what good builders the Romans were.

I thought the Bloomburg Space with the Mithraeum was very atmospheric, and a really smart way to restore and curate the remains - as was the exposed section of the Roman Wall at Vine Street.

Although some of us had visited All Hallows by the Tower in November as part of a walk looking at Medieval London, our visit this time was to the Crypt where restoration work after the Blitz had exposed a Roman Pavement and a tesselated floor from a house together with a plastered wall. We also viewed a model of London in Roman times.

Moving on to Tower Hill, we were able to see a large section of the Roman Wall in situ and get an idea of the height of the Wall. Just to make the location more authentic there is a 20th Century casting of a statue of the Emperor Trajan in front of the Wall. I was rather struck by the fact that he was only as tall as me.

Apparently the statue is a cast of a 1st Century statue of the Emperor found in Minturno and on display in Naples... there are other copies in existence but this one at Tower Hill was found in a Southampton scrapyard in the 1920s. It was a bequest by The Reverend Tubby Clayton (of Toc H significance) who was the Vicar of All Hallows by the Tower. Trajan never came to Britain so a bit of an idiosyncrasy.

We also were able to view another well preserved section of the Wall located in the Courtyard of an upmarket hotel before we proceeded to our lunch stop at King’s College Post Grad student residences in Vine street where yet another substantial section of the Wall has been exposed in the basement of the building. There was also an excellent display of items found at the site.

After an interesting lunch at the cafe at the Vine Street location we moved on via Aldgate, which marked the Eastern boundary of the City, to the Guildhall Art Gallery where there is marked out in the pavement the location of the Roman Ampitheatre which was a surprise discovery at the time of building the Gallery.

The City of London is under constant change and in recent years we have seen the construction of grandiose and aspiring buildings, at times controversial, so architectural ambition and grand statements are nothing new- but our ability and desire to preserve and incorporate our past into modern constructions rather than just to rebury it is relatively new.