Archaeologist (Possibly Dr. Keith Emerick)

Yes, please come down the corridor, follow me.

But then you come into this room and it's quite different. We've opened up a test pit or a test trench in the basement of this room. Yes, there's a filing cabinet right next to us. But you can see a huge chunk of Roman masonry. It's absolutely fantastic. And what we're actually looking at is the south nave wall of the first Roman basilica, which was the first town hall built in London.

And it's a hugely significant building. This is a tiny fragment. The original building was 40 metres long, about 20 metres wide and probably about 12 metres high. So it would have been a really, really big, imposing building within Roman London.

We were hoping to find fragments of it. It's been known, more and more information about this building has been gathered over the last 50, 60 years really. It's been pieced together and identified as this first town hall. But we didn't know that there would be this much of it surviving.

We thought there would be a few fragments and we're absolutely amazed and thrilled that there's so much of it here. And in the next room as well, you've got a bit more, haven't you? Yeah, it carries on. So we know it's at least 10 or 15 metres long. And then we think it carries on out underneath the walls of the building, out into Gracechurch Street. So a nice chunk of it survives.

How significant is this find? I mean, what sort of place would this have been? This is so significant. This is the heart of Roman London. It's the heart of commerce. This building... The Basilica was the administrative centre of London, administrative and political centre, really. So it's a bit like, in 2,000 years' time, somebody dug up the House of Commons and found the Speaker's chair.

You know, that's what we're looking at. This site and this building will tell us so much about the origins of London, why London grew, why it was chosen as the provincial capital, all sorts. It's just amazing, amazing.

Well, the Basilica was the town hall, and then in front of it was a big open market square with ranges of sort of shops and offices around the outside. And it's a space where there would have been a market square, but also festivals and great speeches would have been given there.

It's likely that the Forum square would have had, you know, statues to Roman gods and important emperors and that sort of thing. But it's the place you came really to do business and it's the place you came to get your court case sorted out and it's where laws were made and it's where decisions were made about London but also about the rest of the country.

Yeah, it's amazing. This pit, actually, is just like a window into Roman London, and there are so many spaces in London and our other cities where you can lift up the basement floor and find something amazing, and it's just such a great connection. It's really fantastic for people to be able to see this, because I think archaeology makes history come alive.

We've opened up a test pit in the basement of this room. Yes, there's a filing cabinet right next to us. But you can see a huge chunk of Roman masonry. It's absolutely fantastic.

It will go down in history as one of the most impressive, most spectacular finds of Iron Age material that's ever been found in Britain. It will inspire people, it will kind of generate interest, it will generate enthusiasm and hopefully it will make people say, you know, I've always wanted to go on a dig, I'll go and do it now.

It will inspire people, it will generate interest, it will generate enthusiasm and hopefully it will make people say, you know, I've always wanted to go on a dig, I'll go and do it now.