Vanessa Harding

Yes, I find that very interesting because it gives us some idea of what the Shakespearean stage might have looked like, that it's much more colourful and much more richly dressed than we might otherwise think.

But it also points to something that we know is true of a lot of London's history, is that it's a recycler of good things, passing them down from the upper echelons down to the lower ones.

Yes, that's absolutely so.

And the idea that people understood what the past was like or even thought about the past in anything like the way that we do now is something that we have to take out of our perceptions.

I should have thought he would have taken a boat.

There's a large commercial traffic crossing the river.

Water taxis, as you might think.

We certainly find peeps learning things from the waterboatmen.

Well, this is the first moment that we can actually see London through somebody else's eyes as being depicted because we have a panorama drawn by Antonis van Vingerde.

And then a few years later, there is clearly a large scale map created of London of which three copper plates survive.

They date from the mid to late 1550s, definitely before 1561 when St.

Paul's Cathedral loses its spire to lightning.

And the maps that we have show St Paul's with its steeple.

It shows London's waterfront, shows London's bridge.

It allows us to see what a densely built up area there was within the walls and just outside.

Huge number of church spires.

This is the classic view of a medieval city, that it's all church spires.

St Paul's with its spire.

It's an attempt at a realistic depiction, which I don't think we've had before.

We've had kind of stylized representations of what a city might be like, which tend to show things like walls and churches, definitely.