The day-to-day realities of an occupation bedded down were explored in the second progamme in the Romans in Britain series

(Oxford Circus, London)

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Imagine dropping a Roman legionary down in the street here. What on earth would he make of our busy and noisy world full of all this traffic and all these crowds of people? Well, I think he might be fazed for a bit, but all of this is something a Roman would understand. They lived in the first multi-ethnic Empire the world had seen, and they knew all about terrible traffic problems in Rome. They were familiar with large buildings, roads, transport and trade in exotic goods, and managing huge crowds of people. The Romans were the world's first moderns and we've inherited more from them than perhaps you might think. This is Oxford Street in London and even this was laid out by the Roman army nearly 2000 years ago.

(Clip from 'Monty Python's Life of Brian')

After the Romans had invaded Britain in AD 43, Roman Britain began to come of age. And if you travel across Britain today you can still see the legacy of nearly four hundred years of Roman occupation - in the roads, in the layout of the fields and the countryside, and in the towns. And there's no better place to grasp how the Romans shaped modern Britain than London. When the Romans invaded, London didn't exist - there were just small rural settlements on the banks of the great river. Twenty years later they'd moved the capital here from Colchester and the foundations of modern London had been laid.

(At the Roman Wall, near the Barbican, London)

By around the year 60 - that's less than a generation after the invasion - we're told by one Roman historian that London was already a thriving, trading, mercantile centre. And London went on to become not only the biggest city in Roman Britain, but one of the biggest ancient cities in the whole of Northern Europe. There's very little of it left now - most of it is way down beneath my feet - and that's because London has continued to grow and develop more or less ever since. And it's now its one of the biggest and most powerful cities in the whole of the world.

What the Romans did was not just found London - they invented Britain itself. Before the invasion the island was a set of tribal chiefdoms. After the Romans had arrived and had crushed the resistance of tribal leaders like Boudicca it quickly became one province, governed from the centre.

(On the bank of the Thames)

The river Thames was what drew the Romans here. It was their highway right into the heart of Britain. Most of Roman London - like most of Roman Britain - has now disappeared, but if you know where to look you can still find evidence of London's distant past. Gustav Milne is an archaeologist who's spent most of his working life alongside the river.

What are all these bits? For example, what about that rather nice piece?

GUSTAV MILNE
Archaeologist
That's late medieval in date, so that's you 500 hundred years old or thereabouts.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
What about that white bit there?

GUSTAV MILNE
Goodness, that's even older. That's a Roman sherd. That's one of these amazing mortariars. It's got this thick flange on the rim, so it would have been a large circular dish which would have been used for grinding up your breakfast cereals.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Now if you've got all those buildings and those exciting things in Roman London, paint me a picture if you can of the kind of life that people living in Roman London were able to enjoy?

GUSTAV MILNE
Well, because of its role as a port, you do get this vast array of exotic merchandise coming in. We find for example lots of amphorae, which are these huge storage jars, and they were carrying cargoes of wine, olive oil, fish sauce, dates, and all sorts of things. So all this exotic produce ends up in cold wet and dreary Britain.

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