Tales of London

Following the devastation of the Blitz during the Second World War, bomb sites were routinely excavated for antiquities before being redeveloped and once more covered over. In September 1954 the director of the Museum of London William Grimes, along with his future wife and fellow archaeologist Audrey Williams, were digging on Walbrook in the City. Both sides of the street had been blown to kingdom come, and Legal & General were due to construct a fourteen-storey modernist monstrosity named Bucklersbury House – after the eponymous adjoining lane – along the western stretch. What Grimes and his team found in their excavations would be the greatest Roman discovery of twentieth century London.

It soon became clear that this section of Walbrook was once the site of a Roman temple, built around AD 240 on the eastern bank of the now-culverted Walbrook River. It was only on the final day of excavations, following a three-week extension that was granted due to the importance of the site, that a sculpted head to the god Mithras was discovered. This made the temple one of only four Mithrea in the country, and the only one in England south of Hadrian’s Wall.

Mithra (without the s) was originally a Persian god, adopted by Rome in the first century AD as Mithras. Little is known about Roman Mithraism, but Mithras is usually depicted in reliefs as a muscular young man killing the primordial bull: this is known as the tauroctony, and is believed to be a symbol of fertility and creation. Mithraism was a mystery cult, with its secrets revealed to its male-only initiates. There were seven grades of initiation, with members calling themselves “syndexioi”, meaning “united by the handshake”. Mithraism was popular with merchants and soldiers, providing a social network for those travelling throughout the Empire. A fraternal society teaching morality and one’s place in the universe, its secrets restricted to those in possession of the handshake, offering companionship to those who might be alone and far from home: in many ways, Mithraism was the Roman version of Freemasonry. It flourished for three centuries, until being suppressed – sometimes violently – by the fledgling Christian religion, whose leaders saw Mithraism as a threat to the religion’s newfound dominance across the Empire.

When the Mithraeum was discovered it was front page news. For two weeks, up to thirty-thousand people a day queued in the drizzle to observe Londinium being unearthed. But the question now was what to do with the ruins: should Legal & General be forced to abandon their plans to construct their carbuncle, with the site converted into a museum? Possibly trying to nip these suggestions in the bud, L&G hastily paid to have the temple relocated one hundred yards to the west on Queen Victoria Street. When in 1962 the Mithraeum was unveiled to the public for the second time it was at contemporary ground level, facing north-south rather than its original east-west, and the materials used to plug the gaps in the ruins bore little resemblance to those used by the ancient Romans seventeen-hundred years prior. Professor Grimes dismissed the reconstruction as being “virtually meaningless”: the original temple had been partly underground, in deference to the cave in which Mithras killed the bull; now it more resembled a building that had been the casualty of a Luftwaffe bomb, with only the foundations still standing.

Forty-five years later however, in 2007, things began to change for the better. The eyesore that was Bucklersbury House was demolished, and plans were formulated for a new Walbrook Square development. After being passed from developer to developer, in 2010 Bloomberg took on the project. A condition of planning permission for the new site was that the Mithraeum had to be relocated as closely as possible, and in a condition as near to, its original subterranean site. A massive excavation commenced, in which fourteen-thousand artefacts, 65,000 shards of pottery, and three tonnes of animal bones were unearthed. The waterlogged conditions created by the adjacent Walbrook River had preserved precious materials that would otherwise have rotted: the sheer quantity of treasures discovered led to the three acre site being dubbed “Pompeii of the North”. Previously only nineteen legible tablets from Roman Londinium had been found: 405 were discovered at the Walbrook site, including the first written reference to London in AD 65.

After much painstaking work, the Mithraeum was relocated to its original site twenty-three feet below ground – albeit slightly west of where it had once stood, as some of the unexcavated walls are too fragile to display. On 14th November 2017 the Mithraeum was once again opened to the public. The three-storey museum is free to enter but must be booked ahead of time to guarantee entry. Descending downwards, it guides visitors through the Mithraic mysteries, and on display are six-hundred of the artefacts discovered by archaeologists since 2010. At the foundation is the temple itself: lights, chanting, and haze aid the visitor in recreating the scenes of wonder that took place here nearly two-thousand years ago.

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