Group Travel Tour Operator and DMC for London

Travel to London and Museum of London

Arrive in London during the afternoon, and make your first stop the Museum of London, close to the Barbican and St Paul’s.

The Museum holds the largest collection of samian ware in the country. In addition, because of the extensive burial evidence found around London, it has a high number of complete vessels and large fragments of other ceramic types. These provide invaluable reference material to excavated sites where ceramic evidence is often fragmentary.

The collection includes the best examples of Roman sculpture to be found in Britain in the form of the marble statues from the Temple of Mithras and an outstanding array of metalwork recovered from the nearby bed of the Walbrook stream.

The superbly preserved nature of the metal collection and the wide-ranging selection of domestic, industrial and religious artefacts make this perhaps the best collection in Britain. The metalwork collection as a whole, ranging from iron hipposandals to knives, spoons, jewellery, tools and toilet implements, provides an unsurpassed collection of everyday items that are invaluable for displays as well as for more specialised research.
Other elements of the Roman collection include coins, glass, wood, leather and bone. The coin collection provides useful reference material in support of the excavated coins held at the Museum of London Archaeological Archive.

Similarly the glass collections support the excavated material to form a highly significant body of evidence for the use and manufacture of glass in the city.

The leather collections are made up of around 1,500 pieces and are a valuable resource for the study of Roman leather-working techniques, particularly shoe manufacture. The most famous pieces are fragments of four ‘bikinis’ which are unparalleled in Britain. The wood collection includes a ladder, a complete barrel and writing tablets.

British Museum and the Romans in London

After breakfast in your hotel, you will meet with your guide at a central point for a short drive around some of the best Roman Sites in the City of London. Your tour will end at the British Museum, where your guide will show you the highlights of the Museum.

You will have chance to visit the Roman Britain Gallery to see where imported goods and settlers from Europe, the Middle East and North Africa created a richer, more diverse society and produced a wealth of mosaics, wall paintings, sculptures, glassware and metalwork.

The laws, administration, currency, architecture, engineering, religion and art of Rome met Britain’s Iron Age societies to create a distinctive ‘Romano-British’ identity, which is illustrated in through a variety of objects and artwork.

Also visit the Gallery which shows the rise of Rome from a small town to an imperial capital that controlled the Mediterranean basin and north-western Europe and the Near East, extending from Scotland to Syria.

The exhibition covers a period of about 1,000 years from Rome’s legendary foundation in 753 BC to AD 324, when the emperor Constantine founded his new, Christian capital at Constantinople (Istanbul).

Objects on display come from all over the empire, reflecting both its vast scale and its diverse geographical, cultural and ethnic nature. They range from stone and metal sculptures of emperors and gods to jewellery, silverware, pottery and glass, including the famous cameo glass Portland Vase.

Leave London at your leisure.