Guildhall Art Gallery
The City's own art collection, free, sitting on top of a genuine Roman amphitheatre you can walk down into. Two thousand years in one free building.
FREE
The lowdown
The Guildhall Art Gallery holds the City of London's own collection, free to walk into, full of grand Victorian paintings, London scenes and a vast canvas of the Siege of Gibraltar that the building was practically designed around. That alone is a decent free half hour.
But the real surprise is in the basement. When they dug the foundations in 1988 they found the lost Roman amphitheatre of Londinium, where the city watched gladiators and executions nearly two thousand years ago. You walk down into the dark and stand on the actual stone, with the outline of the missing walls traced in light around you.
It is one of the most atmospheric free experiences in the City, art upstairs and a Roman arena below, and most people walking past the Guildhall have no idea it is there.
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