Across Roman Britain, we can pick out much that has since become familiar: central heating, hot water and baths, brick and stone houses with straight walls, managed cemeteries beyond city boundaries, literacy, a regulated currency.
But there is really only one thing that lives on as a functioning part of our world: the roads. Roman engineers set a template that still shapes Britain.
Roman grids can often be picked out in our modern cities. When Jenson Button drove a Formula One McLaren along Manchester’s Deansgate in 2011, he was speeding down a Roman road. The junction of Chichester’s two main Roman streets is marked by a medieval cross. A Roman road gave London Oxford Street; another gave the passage that separates the two great blocks of Bloomberg’s new Foster-designed European HQ, opening in the capital in autumn.
Even today the effect is apparent in the countryside, where occasional stretches of long Roman roads disrupt hedgerows on quite different and older alignments. We can still take many of these routes; the Fosse Way between Leicester and Lincoln (the A46) is one, much of Dere Street (the A1 east of the Pennines), another – its Roman metalling has recently been exposed in excavations ahead of major roadworks at Scotch Corner.
Such instances – and there are many more – are details compared to the resilience of the road network as a whole. Earlier this summer, Sasha Trubetskoy published a map of Roman roads in Europe. Trubetskoy is a student at the University of Chicago majoring in statistics. He knows how to mine data.
His Roman Europe is drawn in the style of Harry Beck’s London Underground map. When he posted it on his blog in June, he was bombarded with feedback: “That road passes through my home town,” or, “You forgot to put the sea crossing between Gythium and Gortnya.”
There was heavy demand for a map of Britain, which is reduced to two roads and five towns on the Europe map. So he set to work, and faithful to Beck’s style and thinking (including a colour-coded guide to named roads), the British map is a thing of beauty – and an inspired commentary on Roman road planning.
There is no ancient map of Roman roads, so we are dependent on archaeology for identifying them. We do, though, have the Antonine Itinerary written around AD200, which outlines journeys across the empire in the form of towns passed and the distances between them. It’s not quite Beck’s topological concept – the itinerary ignores compass directions and anything passed on the way.
Research by John Poulter, a retired systems engineer, finds support for this approach to road planning. After a life’s spare time seeking out and mapping roads, Poulter thinks many of them were set out with no more than end points in mind. Sections of Roman road between Chichester and London, for example, suggest an unwaveringly direct alignment of 70 miles; surveyors managed 80 miles between Leicester and Cirencester.
In the British section of the Antonine Itinerary, seven of 15 routes start or end with London, while an eighth (from just inside Scotland to Kent) passes through the capital. Trubetskoy’s more comprehensive map emphasises this London-centric network, with roads heading off to the edges of Romanised Britain like spokes on a wheel.
They have carried messengers, migrants, traders and armies throughout history. Henry VII travelled down Watling Street (now called the A5) to meet Richard III at Bosworth, marching from Leicester on another Roman road. The pattern survives in the layout of our roads and railways, forever embedding London as the economic and political centre of the UK.
Did it have to be like that? There was no London before Rome invaded – the site was an unoccupied borderland of river and marsh. By contrast, people in what is now Dorset and Hampshire were already trading extensively with the Roman world, importing raw materials and Italian wine. Indeed, close contact between Wessex and France went back a further two millennia. There were also good natural harbours at Poole and Southampton (which later developed its own Roman port).
If all roads led to Southampton and not London, might we now have a capital on the south coast? A metropolis equidistant between a diminished London and Cardiff, and Canterbury and Plymouth? Or even an Isle of Wight to challenge New York’s Long Island?
London may be where it is because generations of native Britons had deemed the place fit only for water birds and eel-fishing. The site was the best option for a subjugating force seeking somewhere from which to govern and trade. Once the river bridge was built and a few streets laid out, all that remained was for surveyors to sight out the roads. Britannia was made.
Mike Pitts is the editor of British Archaeology
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