Romano-British architecture
- Gallery: Room 49
- Culture: Romano-British
- Date: 4thC(early)
- Object type: architecture
- Materials: stone
- Museum number: 1989,1101.1.a
- Museum: The British Museum
- Collection record: British Museum website
- Image © The Trustees of the British Museum, shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.
Listen to the free audio guide
About this object
Before you is a section of the façade from a Romano-British building dating to the early fourth century AD. The structure resembles an aisled barn and features a tall design with clerestory windows and a blind arcade above. Greenstone capitals of the Ionic order are clearly visible, with a small volute still in place on the right-hand example.
The walls use flints to create a textured, rusticated effect, while the building once had projecting tile cornices above the windows and arcade. Excavated in Hampshire, this fragment is part of a larger structure that historians have carefully reconstructed based on the arrangement of the remains.
Though the building was secular in use, its design resembles the early Romanesque churches of later centuries, suggesting a possible link between Roman and medieval architectural traditions. Holes in the façade mark where a later Anglo-Saxon wooden structure was built long after the original building collapsed.
See it in person
Romano-British architecture is on display in Room 49 at the British Museum on Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, London — free to enter. Choose British Museum on audioguide.london and take a photo of it to hear this free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
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