London Through Time

One street corner in the City of London — the foot of London Bridge, where Fish Street Hill meets Thames Street — rebuilt nine times over 2,200 years. Drag the timeline from 100 BC to 2100 and watch the block transform around you: marsh becomes a Roman bridgehead, a Saxon wharf, a street of jettied Tudor shops five and a half metres wide, brick and sash windows after the Great Fire, black Portland stone in a coal fog, a bomb site on the night of 29 December 1940, glass offices, and a raised river wall in 2100. The buildings, roofs, shopfronts, advertisements, street lamps, traffic, clothes, river level, sky and air all change with the year, and every one of them is period-correct: Latin shop signs in AD 100, painted trade signs before literacy was general, real Bovril and Pears’ Soap enamels in 1900, and Ministry of Information posters that were genuinely issued in 1940. Walk the street at eye level or orbit the whole block, and click the markers to read what you are looking at. The Monument, put up in 1677, is the only thing that never moves.