The Museum of London site (now closed as they prepare to move to their new site, coincidentally near the AWS HQ), and there was a window you could look down on part of the wall, which you can also see from the other side of the road near Barbican. I won't give directions, as that seems futile anywhere near Barbican, but I had only just thought about how weird it is that there is wall at Tower Hill, and wall at Barbican - they can't be the same run of wall as it was built, can they? That'd be immense...
The new Museum's site also has a very cool view through a window, but it's a view of the passing trains [underground], because historically that building (one of London's markets) had a freight service and of course there's no room to move a railway line under London so even though it hadn't needed a freight service for decades the passenger service over the same rails still exists and you will be able to wave to surprised (if they haven't taken that route before) passengers from inside the museum.
A friend lucked into (there's literally a lottery for popular sites) tickets for the new site in Open House London 2024 and the window existed but wasn't really set up for tourists yet of course.
I'm terrible at keeping secrets so, it was probably a bad idea to let me go on the tour, or, perhaps we should try to have fewer secrets so that I'd remember ?
Well, not quite, these aren't tube trains, they're ThamesLink trains, so it would be a mainline railway station, not a tube station, albeit underground. And they already have more appropriate stops in London.
There is a London Wall Walk, starting at the Tower of London. Text copied from the plaques at the postern: (thanks Google Lens)
>The London Wall Walk follows the original line of the City Wall for much of its length, from the royal fortress of the Tower of London to the Museum of London, situated in the modern high-rise development of the Barbican. Between these two landmarks the Wall Walk passes surviving pieces of the Wall visible to the public and the sites of the gates now buried deep beneath the City streets. It also passes close to eight of the surviving forty-one City churches.
The Walk is 134 miles (2.8km) long and is marked by twenty-one panels which can be followed in either direction. Completion of the Walk will take between one and two hours. Wheelchairs can reach most individual sites although access is difficult at some points.
If you're in the vicinity of the road called London Wall (where the car park referenced in the article is) then it's only a short walk to London's Roman amphitheatre [1]. It doesn't seem to be very well known but is quite impressive. It's one of very many bits of Roman history entombed in basements of London buildings.
The Merrill Lynch Financial Centre also has a big chunk of Roman stuff in the basement - but there's no public access and no access to the walkway around the ruins even if you're an employee.
In Exeter[1], we still have roughly 70% of our Roman wall[2], and there is even a pedestrian footbridge over a road where part of the "bridge" involves walking along the top of the wall's remains.
I found that I generally ran out of things to talk about after a couple of years. I have more hobbies now so perhaps I could go a lot longer, but talking about those would make a feed nobody wants to follow.
Looks like 2007 shows a 404, so maybe there are a few tiny gaps. Still, over 23 years of constant blogging is pretty awesome indeed. It’s in stark contrast to blogspot pages I’ve found that stopped in 2011
On the subject of walls... Cortez reported seeing a wall blocking off an entire valley on his way to Tenochtitlan. One source reported the wall was 6 miles long, and yet it seems to have disappeared without a trace. And yet, Both the London Wall and Hadrian's Wall, though much older still have surviving ruins to this day.
Cut stone is worth stealing to make new buildings.
In 1491 the point is made that the Inca believed that they had been beaten by superior gods and so they bowed out. But he doesn’t really talk about what happened to the Aztecs. You steal stone from structures you don’t care about anymore.
Didn’t Mexico see more intensive colonization? Settlers would care less about existing structures. Maybe the Spaniards built missions out of the wall.
Not London Wall related but the London Bloomberg HQ when it was built reconstructed the Temple of Mithras at the actual position, quite deep underground.
For more of this sort of thing, check out the Old Structures Engineering blog. Don does a post a day, day in, day out -- so obviously some are more detailed than others. I enjoy having it in my feed.
I worked for Lloyd’s Register for a spell, and their cafeteria was where the Vine Street building is, just got used to eating lunch there by the bits of wall everyday for a few years.
Very few people on HN will have been alive when there was a county of London. It ceased to exist in the 1960s.
The UK does not require this layer of subdivision to exist, so it's not that there's a different county or set of counties covering the same area now but rather there is no county. This is a contrast to say the US system where AIUI there must be a county and in some cases that county doesn't really matter (e.g. New York County in New York City aka Manhattan) but it has to exist anyway.
City status is very different here, the Monarch (ie now Charlie) gets to decide what is or is not a city, but because that's arbitrary it also has very few consequences, it's a cosmetic basically, you can write "City" on some signs if you like, but if you feel like a small town you still feel like a small town, and if you already feel like a bustling city then having the word doesn't make a real difference.
And the US the a sovereign state made up of 50 states. They used to be called that because they were independent countries
There are other offenders, but the US and UK together are probably the main reason English no longer has concise but unambiguous way to refer to sovereign states
> They used to be called that because they were independent countries
The latter part is true of exactly one US state (Hawaii), but otherwise false. They are called that because they are political bodies capable of international relations. The 13 founding states were British colonies; Florida, New Mexico and Texas were famously Mexican and/or Spanish colonies, and the western half of the continental states were French colonies (though largely unexplored by France, so only nominally held).
I believe GP is technically correct in several ways. The first 13 states were mostly independent and sovereign under the Articles of Confederation from 1781 until 1789, when the US Constitution superseded it and established a much more significant central government.
Texas was an independent republic from 1836 until US annexation at the end of 1845. Although Mexico did not recognize the independence of the Republic of Texas, numerous other countries did.
California is more of an edge-case. It was arguably an independent republic for a few weeks in 1846. And a similar story with Florida: the Republic of West Florida existed for a couple months in 1810. But both of these cases were basically small uprisings that weren't broadly recognized by other countries.
For even further confusion "London" actually contains two cities: London and Westminster. London was a walled city but Westminster was not. So "London" was we know it today is more like Westminster than London.
A cathedral is neither necessary nor sufficient for city status. City status in the UK is given by the monarch and that's all there is to it. Cambridge is a city without a cathedral and Bury St Edmunds is a town with a cathedral.
New York is an obvious example of two entities of the same name, with the “City of” version being a small part of the larger version. It’s just on a much bigger scale.
Eh. If you live in Schaumburg and someone from England asks where you live, you'd probably just say Chicago.
The Windy City does have a kind of "get out" in that people refer to the larger metro area as "Chicagoland" whereas London is still just London thirty miles out from the financial district.
Not bad engineering to make it through a handful of civil wars, a Blitz, and a couple thousand V-1 rockets mostly intact. You have to wonder how long all the steel and concrete that's been laid around the Thames from our civilization will last.
Most of the wall has been plundered for stone and to make way for new development over the past millennium. Its not conflict that has destroyed 2 miles of a 6m high 3m thick wall, it's peace :)
Unfortunately it didn't mention the section in that carpark! But I can attest that the section behind the Leonardo Royal Hotel is amazing. I also recommend the tower remains on the Barbican estate (and really, just wander around the Barbican for a while, it's a wild place in general).
For another interesting mix of new and ancient, check out the Serdica metro station in Sofia, Bulgaria. [0] It's fully inside an excavated Roman-era ruin. Very cool!
One more strange place: the barbershop in Leadenhall Market.
You can see the wall right in the barbershop.
In fact, this wall drove their rent higher and eventually they closed.
(Forgive the sob story, but the barber was amazing, and they closed down + fired everyone with no notice to customers. I have not been able to track him down since!)
If you leave ground alone all sort of things grow on it or lay on it. Dirt, mud, leaves etc. Soil grows at about 1 mm per year. 1 meter in 1000 years.
Historically cities were hit by floods and wars and new buildings were built on top of the foundations of old ones. We had an article about that church in Rome built over another roman church built over another roman church, etc. down to an old temple on a spring, or something like that.
It might even happen faster than that. If I don't sweep my cement patio for about a month, the decaying leaves from the bushes are enough to make about an 1/8th inch of fresh brown soil under the leaf piles.
> Delgado received his first big assignment back in 1978 while working for the National Park Service: excavating and studying the remains of the Niantic, one of the first whaling vessels that brought gold-seekers to the area. It had been discovered near the Transamerica Pyramid at the corner of Clay and Sansome streets. After being left behind during the Gold Rush, the ship had been repurposed to serve as a storeship, saloon, and hotel until its demise in an 1851 fire.
Before industrial demolition was common, old buildings would be town down and material repurposed for new constructions, build on top of existing foundations and rubble. Do this enough over the centuries and your city will slowly rise in height.
If anyone’s ever in Barcelona I recommend checking out the history museum, which is literally built on top of some Roman and medieval ruins. You can descend into the basement to see the excavated remains of the foundations of Roman buildings that had been levelled and built on top of.
Tons of cities have hidden underground streets that are the old street level and now abandoned due to all manner of modernization.
Walking around Chicago I often see houses where the front door is a couple of meters below street level because the house never moved its door to an upper story when the city was releveled.
Every time a building fell apart due to earthquake, fire, flood, war, abandonment- the good material was taken for reuse and the bad material became rubble which was often smoothed out and used as a foundation.
A friend lucked into (there's literally a lottery for popular sites) tickets for the new site in Open House London 2024 and the window existed but wasn't really set up for tourists yet of course.
For context, this line is Thameslink, just south of Farringdon, on the east (heading south) side.
that states it ran from the Tower of London to the Museum in the Barbican.
>The London Wall Walk follows the original line of the City Wall for much of its length, from the royal fortress of the Tower of London to the Museum of London, situated in the modern high-rise development of the Barbican. Between these two landmarks the Wall Walk passes surviving pieces of the Wall visible to the public and the sites of the gates now buried deep beneath the City streets. It also passes close to eight of the surviving forty-one City churches. The Walk is 134 miles (2.8km) long and is marked by twenty-one panels which can be followed in either direction. Completion of the Walk will take between one and two hours. Wheelchairs can reach most individual sites although access is difficult at some points.
Sorry, this is suggesting I can walk over a hundred miles in 1-2 hours???
Google Lens appears to have missed the point here.
The Merrill Lynch Financial Centre also has a big chunk of Roman stuff in the basement - but there's no public access and no access to the walkway around the ruins even if you're an employee.
[1] https://www.thecityofldn.com/directory/londons-roman-amphith...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isca_Dumnoniorum [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exeter_city_walls
I think I have a blog/digital journal from around 2007 or so, but with HUGE gaps (years) where I lost interest.
Pretty incredible in its own right
In 1491 the point is made that the Inca believed that they had been beaten by superior gods and so they bowed out. But he doesn’t really talk about what happened to the Aztecs. You steal stone from structures you don’t care about anymore.
Didn’t Mexico see more intensive colonization? Settlers would care less about existing structures. Maybe the Spaniards built missions out of the wall.
Recent examples:
https://oldstructures.com/2025/10/24/not-quite-a-tunnel/ https://oldstructures.com/2025/10/21/relieved/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London
Title should probably read "the City of London" rather than "London".
Not really. It’s about the Roman wall. It happens to be both in Greater London and around the City.
> Title should probably read "the City of London" rather than "London".
There’s only one Roman city wall in London, it is not ambiguous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc
Here is the US, the "city of Chicago" is the same as "Chicago".
The UK does not require this layer of subdivision to exist, so it's not that there's a different county or set of counties covering the same area now but rather there is no county. This is a contrast to say the US system where AIUI there must be a county and in some cases that county doesn't really matter (e.g. New York County in New York City aka Manhattan) but it has to exist anyway.
City status is very different here, the Monarch (ie now Charlie) gets to decide what is or is not a city, but because that's arbitrary it also has very few consequences, it's a cosmetic basically, you can write "City" on some signs if you like, but if you feel like a small town you still feel like a small town, and if you already feel like a bustling city then having the word doesn't make a real difference.
There are other offenders, but the US and UK together are probably the main reason English no longer has concise but unambiguous way to refer to sovereign states
The latter part is true of exactly one US state (Hawaii), but otherwise false. They are called that because they are political bodies capable of international relations. The 13 founding states were British colonies; Florida, New Mexico and Texas were famously Mexican and/or Spanish colonies, and the western half of the continental states were French colonies (though largely unexplored by France, so only nominally held).
Texas was an independent republic from 1836 until US annexation at the end of 1845. Although Mexico did not recognize the independence of the Republic of Texas, numerous other countries did.
California is more of an edge-case. It was arguably an independent republic for a few weeks in 1846. And a similar story with Florida: the Republic of West Florida existed for a couple months in 1810. But both of these cases were basically small uprisings that weren't broadly recognized by other countries.
That has a cathedral too.
I think it does: the territory administered by the Greater London Authority; i.e. the 32 places called "London Borough of X", plus the City.
For the people that don't know the City of London history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Whittington_and_His_Cat
Even though a large part of its inhabitants don't realize it has a port.
I like Fairfax, VA. It is surrounded by, but not part of, Fairfax County, VA. Despite this, it still serves as the county seat.
The Windy City does have a kind of "get out" in that people refer to the larger metro area as "Chicagoland" whereas London is still just London thirty miles out from the financial district.
Otherwise not a very good WeWork.
Plus the crypt of St Bride's has a Roman pavement to look at. Nice and quiet down there.
Unfortunately it didn't mention the section in that carpark! But I can attest that the section behind the Leonardo Royal Hotel is amazing. I also recommend the tower remains on the Barbican estate (and really, just wander around the Barbican for a while, it's a wild place in general).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdika_Metro_Station
Edit: or Asia and Russia and South America...
In fact, this wall drove their rent higher and eventually they closed.
(Forgive the sob story, but the barber was amazing, and they closed down + fired everyone with no notice to customers. I have not been able to track him down since!)
What?! That's huge. What happened?
Historically cities were hit by floods and wars and new buildings were built on top of the foundations of old ones. We had an article about that church in Rome built over another roman church built over another roman church, etc. down to an old temple on a spring, or something like that.
Or you can go on a virtual tour[3]
[1] https://www.basilicasanclemente.com/eng/
[2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/zpXpQuxQLUvE5TLA9
[3] https://www.basilicasanclemente.com/eng/a-virtual-tour/
My figure of 1 mm is about the compacted result of decaying and layering. It may vary a lot according to the configuration of the ground.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Formation_of_Vegetable_Mou...
Buried ships of San Francisco - https://www.nps.gov/safr/learn/historyculture/buried-ships-o...
https://www.baylightscharters.com/bay-lights-charters-blog/w...
> Delgado received his first big assignment back in 1978 while working for the National Park Service: excavating and studying the remains of the Niantic, one of the first whaling vessels that brought gold-seekers to the area. It had been discovered near the Transamerica Pyramid at the corner of Clay and Sansome streets. After being left behind during the Gold Rush, the ship had been repurposed to serve as a storeship, saloon, and hotel until its demise in an 1851 fire.
Consider that https://maps.app.goo.gl/tYjaESQXss2KhHXQA used to be sea level.
As mentioned else comment, things were torn down and that served as the foundation for the next building.
Walking around Chicago I often see houses where the front door is a couple of meters below street level because the house never moved its door to an upper story when the city was releveled.