Restoration (c. AD 270–85)

London’s late antique restoration was signalled by the construction of a monumental riverside wall, the renewal of luxurious town houses within town, and the development of new patterns of supply. Recent dendrochronological evidence indicates that the riverside wall was probably built in the late 270s, perhaps under Aurelian and then Probus following the collapse of the Gallic Empire. Contemporary fortifications were built at other sites in southern Britain in this assertion of a new language of imperial control. It is suggested that changed patterns of urban supply reflect on the administrative reforms that supported these defended sites. London’s revival may also have relied on new settlement, and recent studies of cemetery populations around the city indicate that some 20–40 per cent of the buried dead—admittedly from an extremely small sample—had arrived from elsewhere in the Roman Empire.