دانلود کتاب Roman London

Ralph Merrifield’s "Roman London" is the first, chronologically, in a series of books that will give a portrait of the city of London at significant periods in its history. We sometimes think that bygone London must be dead and past, buried for ever beneath towering office blocks and sprawling suburban housing — but we are wrong. These books describe a living city, where each succeeding age has left its indelible and identifiable mark upon the London of today.

Londinium was a busy trading and political center and an early military base, built on the north bank of a wider, shallow Thames, where first it could be bridged, with a ribbon-developed settlement on the south bank. It bustled with familiar, recognizable people: a careless housewife who dropped her ladle down a well, into which a girl’s leather bikini trunks also, mysteriously, found their way; a bargemaster whose boat sank at Blackfriars; an absentee workman whose wanderings were immortalized in six words scratched upon a tile; and open-air tradesmen who held a thriving market on the banks of the Walbrook. In fact, we should probably feel curiously at home in the London Mr. Merrifield so vividly describes, with its mixture of gravity and frivolity, taste and tawdriness, public works and private enterprise, sophistication and barbarism, craftsmanship and gimcrackery.

This portrait of London, built up after years of patient research by professional and amateur archaeologists, is carefully related to twentieth-century London. The amateur archaeologist, the tourist, the London-lover can, with Mr. Merrifield as his stimulating guide, discover for himself that Londinium lies around him still. In London today there are many treasured Romano-British relics, in museums, in public and private buildings, and in the streets and gardens of the city itself. On foot or by map, the reader can follow the Roman city’s plan, or strike out beyond the walls, north, south, east, and west, up the great military highways along which men could freely pass during nearly four hundred years of the Pax Romana. This splendid book, with its carefully selected illustrations, details these treasures and describes where and how Roman London may be seen today.