Bloomberg SPACE brings Roman Temple of Mithras to life in new cultural experience

A Roman temple has been restored to its original site seven metres below the City of London, using sound, lights and misty haze to bring the ruin back to life. Built in the third century, the London Mithraeum was discovered by chance in 1954 on a World War II bomb site. It became an instant public sensation, with up to 30,000 people per day queueing to see it. The temple to the god Mithras was dismantled and reassembled 100 metres away from its original location so the public could see it when post-war rebuilding on the site was complete. But now the ruins have been moved back and restored, deep beneath Bloomberg’s vast new European headquarters by the Bank of England. “London is a Roman city, yet there are few traces of its distant past that people can experience first-hand,” said Sophie Jackson, the project’s lead archaeological consultant. The reconstruction puts the temple back in place, as it looked at the end of the 1954 excavation.