IF you want to know what life was really like in Roman Londinium, head for the Mithraeum. It’s London’s best surviving Roman temple, buried 23ft underground, near Bank station. More than 14,000 Roman artefacts have been unearthed here since it was first discovered in 1954 during building work. The ground yielded even more treasures when the new Bloomberg headquarters was built on the site in 2017 and the temple was restored.
The finds were particularly well preserved because they had been wrapped in mud on the banks of the River Walbrook, a tributary of the Thames that still feeds into the great river. As did the volcanic debris at Pompeii, the river mud kept the artefacts free from decay, so the everyday stuff of Roman