The story
When builders dug foundations for a new gallery beside London's Guildhall in 1988, they hit curved stone walls that archaeologists had hunted for over a century, the city's lost Roman amphitheatre. Built around the year 70, it once held thousands of Londoners watching gladiators and executions. The gallery was redesigned to rise on a steel raft above it, and the dark elliptical ruins are now part of the visit, down in the basement.
The gallery upstairs belongs to the City of London and specialises in Victorian and London-themed art. It holds Rossetti's La Ghirlandata, Millais's small, famous My First Sermon, and a wall-sized Georgian crowd-pleaser, John Singleton Copley's Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar.
Bombed in the Second World War and rebuilt only in 1999, the gallery is younger than most of what hangs in it, standing quite literally on two thousand years of the city.
