If Walls Could Talk

Reconstructing Roman London’s fashionable frescos

Recent excavations in Southwark have uncovered one of the largest collections of painted Roman wall plaster ever found in London. Carly Hilts spoke to Han Li about ongoing efforts to piece this 2,000-year-old jigsaw puzzle back together.

The table before me was awash with colour: a shattered sea of pink, yellow, green, and black formed from large chunks and smaller fragments of plaster that had been painstakingly pieced back together to create a coherent whole. Two thousand years ago, these still-vibrant remains would have formed part of a fresco adorning one of the walls of a high-status building in Roman Southwark, clearly signalling the wealth and taste of its owner to anyone who ventured inside. They also represent just a portion of a major archaeological discovery that was unveiled earlier this year: one of the largest assemblages of painted wall plaster that has ever been found from Roman London.

This colourful collection, comprising thousands of individual fragments, was discovered during excavations by MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) on the site of The Liberty, near London Bridge in Southwark. Between 2021 and 2024, these investigations (undertaken on behalf of Landsec, Transport for London, and Southwark Council ahead of the creation of a new cultural quarter) uncovered illuminating insights into the lives and livelihoods of people who lived south of the Thames during the Roman period, including elaborate mosaics and a grand mausoleum that formed part of a large later cemetery (see CA 386 and 402).

Located across the river from the bustle of Londinium, this was a wealthy suburb whose residents built opulent houses along the waterfront. Excavations in the 1980s and in 2005 had already revealed the remains of some of these structures, including the northern part of a large building complex that was interpreted as a possible mansio (a residence for important travellers on official business) or a particularly luxurious private dwelling. It was constructed early in Roman London’s history, before AD 120, and although its owners had evidently lavished money on its design, commissioning mosaic floors and elaborately painted walls, MOLA’s more recent work on the site has revealed that the building was relatively short-lived. It was demolished sometime before AD 200, during which time the crumbled remains of its fine frescos were consigned to a large pit, where they would remain until their rediscovery almost 2,000 years later.

COLOURFUL CLUES

Over 120 boxes of plaster fragments – enough to cover an estimated 20 internal walls – were recovered from the site, and the challenge of piecing them back together has been taken up by Han Li, MOLA’s Senior Building Material Specialist. Drawing on parallels from across Europe and insights from other experts – including colleagues at the MOLA finds team, his predecessor Dr Ian Betts, and other scholars including those at the British School at Rome – for months Han has been painstakingly matching edges, images, and even common patterns of dirt or residue on some of the pieces’ surfaces in order to reconstruct long-vanished decorative schemes and tease out what they can tell us about the tastes and cultural connections of some of Roman London’s wealthier inhabitants.

It was Han who was my guide as I gazed at the colourful fragments that had been carefully arranged on a table at MOLA’s headquarters in Hackney. Reconstructing a single, brightly painted wall, they formed a fairly typical design known from sites across the Roman Empire, with repeating panels in a block colour set above a dado painted to look like expensive imported stone. There would have also been a decorative frieze along the top, Han added, but these rarely survive well enough to be reconstructed – as this section of the plasterwork falls from the greatest height when its underlying wall is demolished, it tends to shatter into very tiny pieces, while lower elements generally form larger chunks that are more easily interpreted and reunited.

In this example, the wall had been painted a bright sunflower yellow – a shade that is not in itself unusual in Roman frescos, Han said, though it does not appear to have been a common choice for the main repeating panels. Red seems to have been the more popular colour, though examples of yellow panels are known from other sites including Fishbourne Palace in West Sussex, Silver Street in Lincoln, and Xanten in Germany – and, Han added, there may be others boxed up in archives that are still waiting to be reconstructed. Like those at Xanten, the Southwark structure’s panels were divided with black intervals edged in green and, by closely examining areas where the pigment has flaked away, we can tell that the whole wall was initially painted yellow before the bands were added, rather than setting these out first and then trying to ‘colour inside the lines’.

The black intervals themselves offered even more intricate details, providing the background for delicate images of fruit, flowers, and foliage; lyres; and white birds with long necks and red beaks, possibly some kind of wader, crane, or stork. Many of these had been found in multiple fragments, which Han had carefully fitted back together, and another recurring motif showed a tall candelabrum growing variously out of a slender stem or a bushy vertical spray of leaves and flowers. Thought to have originated in Pompeii, candelabrum imagery was evidently a popular theme as it is found in localised styles across the Roman Empire including at Xanten and Cologne in Germany, Lyon in France, and sites in Britain including Boxmoor in Hertfordshire and Leicester – demonstrating how far artistic ideas and interior design fashions can spread.

This is an extract of an article that appeared in CA 427. Read on in the magazine, or click here to read it online at The Past, where you can read all of the Current Archaeology articles in full as well as the content of our other magazines, Current World Archaeology, Ancient Egypt, and Military History Matters.