The London Wall
About
Roman builders raised a defensive circuit three miles around Londinium using an estimated 85,000 tons of quarried Kentish ragstone, one of the largest construction projects anywhere in Roman Britain. Historians tie its building to the power struggle between the usurper Clodius Albinus and Septimius Severus in the 190s CE. Sections still stand several meters high at Tower Hill and the Barbican today. In 117 CE Londinium had no wall at all — it stood open for at least another 75 years.
What happened here
A town wall is a claim as much as a defence. It is faced in stone, cored with rubble and concrete, and pierced by gates that are more decorated than the rest of it put together. Towers project so that anyone at the base can be shot from the side. In most of the empire in this century the walls are old, unmanned, and half built over — shops lean against them and houses are cut into them — because the frontier is a long way off and the danger is not here. On the frontier itself a wall is something else entirely: a continuous barrier with ditches, gates at intervals, patrol tracks and manned turrets, built to control movement rather than to stop an army.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →