Lunchtime Tourism: London’s amazing Temple of Mithras

The City of London is one fifth Roman. The Londinium that was founded 2000 years ago lasted just over 400 years, and gave us (amongst other things) London’s first private members’ club, The Temple of Mithras. And it’s still here. 

The Walbrook Club is one of the City’s most exclusive hangouts but right opposite is its 2000-year-old predecessor. And you, the Lunchtime Tourist, can go in there for free, unlike its modern-day successor. 

The magnificently storied Mithraeum has been restored by the financier and philanthropist Michael Bloomberg at his eponymous European headquarters. 

Walk up to your destination and approach the doors. Look at the map to the right of the door: the layout of the temple may look familiar. It looks suspiciously like a church. It has a nave, two aisles, a curved end that looks just like a church apse. In the top left is what archaeologists think was a kind of baptismal structure. 

But Britain’s first church was built in 597 AD. Lunchtime Tourists will know that London’s earliest was at All Hallows some 80 years later. This Temple predates them all by at least 400 years. 

So what’s the deal? Well, count the seven columns, indicated by rough circles. Historians think this number is significant. There are seven levels in the Masonic Order, for example. Experts think this Temple was a kind of club, with a hierarchy of initiations and rituals. But no one actually knows. Thankfully Bloomberg sets the scene beautifully for you to make up your own mind. 

Go through the doors and into Bloomberg SPACE. There is a regular (free) art exhibition here, which, with the hundreds of Roman artefacts on display, gives you time to reflect and absorb before you descend the stairs into the light and sound experience, which occurs every 20 minutes. 

The moist conditions of the lost River Walbrook preserved writing tablets and artefacts from these Roman times. There is the first ever mention of a ‘Londinium’ on display here; the earliest written document found in Britain, and, to Michael Bloomberg’s delight, the first commercial trade. All of these are preserved on waxed writing tablets used by early Londoners for note-taking and tallying. 

Now descend the stairs into an extraordinary show. It is six minutes long and tells the story of a mysterious cult based around the mythological Mithras killing a bull in a cave. The strange, windowless surrounds do, indeed, feel cavernous.

Walbrook’s wonder is one of 400 similar Temples found across the Roman Empire. Soldiers, merchants, maybe even Emperors found a common brotherhood (there were no women allowed) wherever they went. This is your inheritance, your club as a citizen of this amazing City. Go and claim your membership. 

• You can book the Temple of Mithras online or download the Bloomberg Connects App which gives details of experiences all over the Capital