Guildhall Art Gallery & Roman London Amphitheatre

The gallery of the City of London provides a fascinating look at the politics of the Square Mile over the past few centuries, with a great collection of paintings of London in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as the vast frieze entitled The Defeat of the Floating Batteries (1791), depicting the British victory at the Siege of Gibraltar in 1782. This huge painting was removed to safety just a month before the gallery was hit by a German bomb in 1941 – it spent 50 years rolled up before a spectacular restoration in 1999. An even more recent arrival is a sculpture of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, which has to be housed in a protective glass case as the iron lady was decapitated here by an angry punter with a cricket bat soon after its installation in 2002. Today, following some tricky neck surgery, Maggie has finally rejoined the gallery’s collection, but her contentious legacy lives on. The real highlight of the museum is deep in the darkened basement, where the archaeological remains of Roman London’s amphitheatre (coliseum) lie. Discovered only in 1988 when work finally began on a new gallery following the original’s destruction in the Blitz, they were immediately declared an Ancient Monument, and the new gallery was built around them. While only a few remnants of the stone walls lining the eastern entrance still stand, they’re imaginatively fleshed out with a black-and-fluorescent-green trompe l’oeil of the missing seating, and computer-meshed outlines of spectators and gladiators. The roar of the crowd goes up as you reach the end of the entrance tunnel and hit the central stage, giving a real sense of how Roman London might have felt. Markings on the square outside the Guildhall indicate the original extent of the amphitheatre, allowing people to visualise its scale.