ERASED CITY - Urban infrastructure : geological and historical layers
The main Roman road, the Via Decumana crossed the Walbrook stream and ran through the site of what is today Nr.1 Poultry Building, designed by James Stirling and completed in 1997.
Archaeological excavations, led by the by the Museum of London Archeological Service MOLAS, went through Victorian basements, medieval deposits, Roman stone and timber buildings dating to AD 47 as well as dark earth, clay, natural gravel, layers of history embedded in layers of soil. Small finds are still being archived in the Museum of London Archaeology Department (MOLA) in East London.
London has many overlapping layers of infrastructure such as the road and tube networks, the sewage system, pipelines, plumbing, interconnecting basements and secret tunnels which cannot be accessed by the public without a special permission. The first image shows a map of J. Balzagette’s complex sewage system for London in 1930.