When archaeologists began digging beneath a construction site in London’s Southwark district, they expected the usual Roman remains: pottery shards, maybe a coin or two. What they found instead was a massive pit filled with broken plaster—thousands of fragments, all from walls that once stood inside a Roman building nearly 2,000 years ago.
At first, the scale of the find wasn’t obvious. The pieces were jumbled, damaged, and covered in soil. It wasn’t until the team started cleaning and sorting them that the bigger picture came into focus: these weren’t ordinary scraps. They were part of an enormous set of frescoes—painted scenes of birds, flowers, musical instruments, and marble-like panels—that once decorated a luxury villa.
Now, after months of careful work, those shattered fragments are being reassembled. Bit by bit, a lost Roman interior is coming back into view.
An Ancient Puzzle
“It was like assembling the world’s most difficult jigsaw puzzle,” said Han Li, the lead specialist at the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), who spent three months bent over tables covered in fragments no bigger than his palm.
The fragments were a chaos of color and time. Plaster pieces had been jumbled together from different rooms. Many were so fragile they could only be reassembled once — any mistake might flake them to dust.
And yet, gradually, shapes and patterns began to reappear. Bright yellow panels framed by soft green borders, candelabras, white cranes, fruit, flowers, a lyre — the harp-like instrument that once filled Roman villas with music and meaning. In one stretch, pink paint was speckled to mimic marble; in another, what looked like a bunch of grapes turned out to be mistletoe, a local twist on Mediterranean luxury.
“That is actually quite interesting for me,” Li told BBC. “Because you’re seeing that the Roman painters are taking a classical idea and they’re very much putting their own North West European, or local, twist on it. I think that’s magnificent.”
Though panel designs were a common decorative choice in the Roman world, this yellow scheme is particularly rare in Britain. It’s been identified at only a few high-status sites, such as the Fishbourne Roman Palace. Now, the Liberty site in Southwark joins that exclusive club — proof, archaeologists say, that the area wasn’t just prosperous. It was elite.
Andrew Henderson-Schwartz from MOLA. dubbed it the Beverly Hills of Roman London. “There was this thriving, bustling settlement quite early on… and what this shows is that the Romans are committing to London.”
Who made it?
Among the thousands of pieces, one fragment stopped the team in their tracks.
Etched into a tabula ansata — a decorative frame Romans used to sign artwork — was a single word: FECIT, Latin for “…has made this.” It was a hint of authorship, the first known artist’s signature from Roman Britain. But just to the left, heartbreakingly, the plaster is broken. The name is missing.
Still, the presence of that word — so formal, so deliberate — suggests that the artists who painted this villa were no mere laborers. They were professionals. Highly skilled, perhaps even renowned.
“They’ve come to Roman London where there was a building boom,” said Li. “And they went around essentially taking on huge commissions of work. It’s amazing to imagine that their work is now again visible to us 2,000 years later.”
Indeed, traces of their methods remain. Under certain lighting, archaeologists spotted the scored outline of a flower inside a circle — a painter’s guideline, likely made with a compass. The image was never painted. “The painters likely changed their mind,” said Li.
Other fragments revealed ghostly human touches. Someone had carved a nearly complete Greek alphabet into one piece of plaster — a practical mark, perhaps a checklist or reference, according to similar finds in Italy. Its clean lines suggest it wasn’t just a scribble, but the work of a confident, literate hand. It is the only known example of the Greek alphabet from Roman Britain.
Elsewhere, a faint face appears: a woman, crying, her tears carved into plaster. Her hairstyle hints at the Flavian period — between A.D. 69 and 96 — a small but moving portrait of sorrow etched in lime and limewash.
Piecing Together a Forgotten Palace
These frescoes once decorated a building constructed between A.D. 43 and 150, during the early expansion of Londinium, the Roman city that would become London. It may have been a private residence for the wealthy or even a high-end guesthouse for elite travelers moving through the capital of Roman Britain. Other finds on the site, including mosaics and a rare Roman mausoleum, only add to its prestige.
Though its walls have long since collapsed, the building’s colors, patterns, and stories are slowly being restored. Senior Illustrator Faith Vardy, working with archaeologists and material specialists, has begun watercolour reconstructions of the original walls.
Work on the fragments continues, and researchers hope more pieces will emerge, including the elusive signature. In the meantime, the frescoes serve as a vivid reminder: empires fall, buildings crumble, but beauty — even in pieces — can still find its way back to light.
