Time in London

Staying in the heart of the City of London was a pragmatic decision, because it put us on the Northern subway line that took us within a 20 minute walk of the British Museum's collections storage.

But it was also a sentimental decision. Looking at a map of this part of London, today the financial center (and thus never until now a place we had stayed) the first striking thing is the map of the old city surrounded, but not erased, by the new. London Wall Street literally traces the arc of the great wall of the old Roman city of Londinium. The main streets in the City run out like rays from a center point.

Somewhere here, I knew, a Temple of Mithras had been found during construction work. I wanted to find that piece of physical memory, whose location was somewhat hazy in the various sources I read. And eventually, we found it, but along the way we found much more.

I was taken by the street names, references to the crafts that once were practiced, and my eye was drawn to the London Guildhall. I walked us past it, expecting nothing, and found a massive ornate building that looked as if generations of earlier buildings had been gradually covered up. I guessed that it had survived the Great Fire of London in 1666, and guessed that the oldest part might have 16th century roots. In fact, it was started in 1411.

Buried beneath the Guildhall, open for visits through its art museum, I found my dose of Roman materiality: the east gate of the original Roman amphitheater. Once we knew it existed, we were able to see a blue arc of pavement in the courtyard of the Guildhall, showing the outline of the amphitheater. The Temple of Mithras was anticlimatic, standing rebuilt and open to rainfall, covered in green moss, next to the building called Temple Court on Queen Victoria Street. But what they brought to our walk through the City of 2010 was a sense of thousands of years of history.

This would have been enough to make the City come alive for me. But there was more. As we walked through the abandoned streets on Saturday, devoid of the bankers and businessmen who crowded the sidewalks during the week, a Song Cycle of early modern music flowed out of corners and byways. "Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares, John Dowland, 1604" occupied the corner of Milk Street and Russia Row as we wandered down toward the banks of the Thames, following the echoes of time in London.