Rome gets all the glory when it comes to amphitheatres. With Gladiator II rampaging onto screens on this week, the Italian capital will once again bask in the free PR for its (admittedly impressive) Colosseum. But did you know that we have London’s answer to the big ring right here below our feet?
Tucked away in the Guildhall enclave, close to Moorgate Tube station, is the Guildhall Art Gallery. Dodge through the many building sites and you enter a quiet plaza with a ring of dark stone set into the pavement, tracing where London’s Roman Amphitheatre once stood. Bits of it are, amazingly, still standing, but you must descend into the bowels of the gallery to find it.
Put your bags through a little scanner and you’re free to wend your way through rooms of art down various staircases. There, in a dimly lit basement, are the stone and timber remnants of an amphitheatre that was first built in 70AD from timber, before being upgraded with stone and tile some time in the second century, as Londinium reached new cosmopolitan heights.
Roughly elliptical in shape and measuring 100 by 85 metres, it would have been able to hold up to 6,000 spectators. Given that here in 21st-century London we can pack 90,000 people into Wembley Stadium, that might seem quite piddling. But in the second century there were about 30,000 people living in the whole of Londinium. Imagine a venue where you could scream and bay for blood with one in five of your fellow Londoners.
And there would have been a lot of blood to bay for. This theatre’s programme was a lot bloodier than the fare you’d find on the West End currently. Gladiator fights, wild animal hunts (RIP to the wolves and bears), and the mass execution of criminals would have all been standard popular viewing for the amphitheatre-going public. As a central entertainment venue, it may also have hosted sporting events and religious ceremonies. Extreme violence was the norm. In 1988, three years after the amphitheatre was rediscovered, 39 skulls— called the Walbrook Skulls for their proximity to the now subterranean river — were found in a nearby excavation. They were all young men who had suffered multiple head traumas, whose bodies had been thrown in an open pit, suggesting an inglorious end for criminals, or gladiators that didn’t make it to the end of the games.
All this bread and circus business would have been at the largesse of the city’s wealthiest residents. While public money would have funded the building of the amphitheatre, it would have been the Roman equivalent of today’s rich footing the bill for all the bloodsports. Imagine present-day oligarchs funding a Charli XCX concert, but with murder. Some educated Romans turned their noses up at all the carnage (the yoghurt-knitting liberal metropolitan elite of their time), but for most it was considered a jolly day out.
The gallery display itself rather glosses over the gorier elements, visualising the scale of the games in neon green outlines that show nude men grappling. “The Romans did not conceive of human rights the same way we do,” one display cheerily informs visitors. If you can read it — the atmospheric lighting makes the flat, dark and shiny signs somewhat hard to parse.
Still, the tomb-like atmosphere feels appropriate given the scale of the death that would have happened here. As you enter the display area you are walking through what would have been the gate to the arena itself, sandwiched between chambers that once might have housed the sacrificial animals. A looping audio track pipes muffled cheers into the gloom. Below your feet, reinforced glass reveals the drainage ditches — impressive engineering from our forebears.
Going underground
It’s impressive that this much has survived at all. Gladiatorial games had fallen out of favour by the fourth century thanks to Christianity ushering in a view that they were pits of idolatry and sin. Londinium was abandoned by the crumbling Roman Empire by the fifth century, and the amphitheatre was left to go to ruin, with some of its stones likely nicked. Like the rest of the city, it was eventually covered by a layer of dark earth — a mysterious-sounding name for what is basically centuries of mulched-up waste, the first of many layers built atop each other, sealing London’s earliest history below modern ground level.
By medieval times, new construction was built over the old amphitheatre, and it was all but forgotten. Historians theorised that Londinium, given its size and status, would have had one. But it wasn’t until 1988 that archaeologists working on the site of the Guildhall’s new art gallery stumbled upon it. Thanks to the area’s soggy soil, a remarkable amount of timber has been preserved.
Even if you’re not a history nut, the London Roman Amphitheatre is worth a visit to experience that curious sense of vertigo about how much there is below our feet. London is a palimpsest city, but as you pound the pavement you can forget how much lies just a few storeys below. It’s not gelato in the Italian sunshine or Paul Mescal in a loincloth, but for free entry it’s a much more cost-effective journey to the past than a flight to Rome or indeed a cinema ticket.
