In a shadowy area of interest of the Museum of London lies one among its biggest treasures: the Head of Mithras, found just a few streets away in 1954. Mithras was a god related to the solar and the ritual slaying of a bull: his cult might have originated in modern-day Iran however, by the third century AD, a temple had been based in his honour on the reverse finish of the Roman Empire: a wet outpost beside the Thames, in what would someday grow to be the monetary district of the town of London.
The Head of Mithras is a survivor from one of many earliest incarnations of the UK’s capital. However it additionally represents one other key interval: the aftermath of the Second World Conflict, when Mithras was unearthed from crater-strewn streets. The destruction supplied archaeologists a window to look into the town’s historical previous. It additionally supplied an opportunity to rebuild the Metropolis of London, together with creating a brand new museum on London Wall, the perimeter of the Roman metropolis.
On 4 December, the Museum of London will shut its doorways after virtually half a century, reopening in 2026 in a brand new location ten minutes’ stroll away in Smithfield Market—to be renamed the London Museum. The 1976 constructing’s future stays unsure, with plans for demolition met with native opposition. Against this, £337m will probably be spent reworking derelict sections of Smithfield Market, with the domed Victorian fruit market as its centrepiece. “The Museum of London may be very a lot tied up with the reconstruction of London after the Second World Conflict,” says Finbarr Whooley, the museum’s director of content material. “So there’s a lot disappointment to see it shut—even when it would flip into one thing thrilling in Smithfield Market, which is stuffed with social historical past.”
Over the approaching months, 500,000 objects will probably be taken out of storage and packed up for the brief journey. It will embrace loads of fashionable relics; the just lately closed Cloth has been introduced because the museum’s ‘nightclub in residence’ and the ‘Trump Child Blimp’ will probably be on everlasting show. Galleries will probably be dedicated to subterranean London—the unseen realm of sewer-builders and broadband cables standing cheek by jowl with Roman relics, in addition to the numerous stays of 20,000 Londoners, a shadow inhabitants who, from Roman occasions to the current day, have crossed the edge of the previous metropolis partitions to dwell their lives within the throng past.
