The Story of Old Kent Road: The Roman Highway London Forgot

[00:00:00]Old Kent Road is the cheapest square on the Monopoly board, 60 pounds to buy, 2 pounds rent. A punchline since 1935 for a street nobody thinks twice about.

[00:00:12]But in 2024, workers digging beneath this road found a section of Roman highway sealed under the tarmac for nearly 2,000 years.

[00:00:24]The same ground where Chaucer's pilgrims [music] watered their horses, where Henry the fifth processed home from Agincourt, and where German bombs tore through a gasworks on the first night of the Blitz. So, how did [music] the most significant road in South London become a joke on a board game?

[00:00:43]A team from the Museum of London Archaeology, working alongside archaeological consultants RPS, had long assumed the Roman road was down there. Roman roads are straight, and Old Kent Road is straight.

[00:00:58]A previous section had been found at the Cantium Retail Park in the early 1990s, but it sat south of the modern road's line.

[00:01:08]This find was different. It lay directly beneath the current surface.

[00:01:13]The base of today's road rests on the [music] Roman fabric itself, compacted gravel, chalk, and sand, sealed by nearly 2,000 years of construction above it.

[00:01:24]Southwark Council's in-house archaeology officer, Dr. Chris Constable, said the discovery had redrawn the Roman road map for Southwark. It answered questions [music] that had been open since that earlier excavation three decades before.

[00:01:39]But this road's story did not begin with the Romans.

[00:01:43]It may not even have begun with civilization.

[00:01:47]This story starts on a coastline 80 miles to the southeast.

[00:01:52]It has been suggested, though never definitively proven, that parts of [music] this route may have prehistoric origins, an ancient trackway used long before any Roman soldier set foot in Britain.

[00:02:06]Scholarly suggestion, not settled fact.

[00:02:10]But what is certain is that in 43 AD, the Roman army crossed the English Channel >> [music] >> and landed on the Kent coast.

[00:02:18]Emperor Claudius had ordered the invasion of Britain and the legions that came ashore at Richborough brought with them not only soldiers, but engineers.

[00:02:27]The Romans understood that a road wins the war, holds the territory, and turns conquest into civilization.

[00:02:34]Within 5 years, they had begun building one of the most important roads [music] in the new province.

[00:02:40]Watling Street, classified in the Roman system as the Inter Three, ran from the port of Dover on the Channel coast, through Canterbury, >> [music] >> across the Thames at the new settlement of Londinium, and onward to Verulamium, modern-day St. Albans, and eventually to Wroxeter in Shropshire.

[00:02:58]It linked London with the Channel ports at Richborough, [music] Dover, and Lympne.

[00:03:04]The section through what is now Southeast London was built in the winter [music] of 47 AD and 48 AD.

[00:03:10]The 2024 excavation revealed exactly how it was built.

[00:03:15]A compacted gravel foundation at the base, sealed by two layers of chalk, then topped with a final layer of compacted sand and gravel.

[00:03:24]The original road surface would have sat at approximately the same level [music] as the modern tarmac above it, though that upper layer has been lost to centuries of activity.

[00:03:34]Around London, the road measured [music] between 7 and 1/2 and 8 and 1/2 m wide, and it was resurfaced at least twice before 60 AD.

[00:03:43]This was not a country lane.

[00:03:45]It was a military and logistical artery.

[00:03:48]Troops, supplies, dispatches, and the administrative machinery of empire moved along it constantly.

[00:03:54]The Romans [music] connected Britain to the wider world through this road. It was the spine of Rome's eastern British operation.

[00:04:01]The original [music] Celtic or Roman name for the road is unknown.

[00:04:06]The Romans may not have regarded it as a single named route at all.

[00:04:10]The name Watling Street [music] is Anglo-Saxon in origin, derived from Wæcelinga Stræt, the street of the Wæcelingas, a Saxon tribe.

[00:04:19]The modern name came centuries after the road was built.

[00:04:23]The road was barely 15 years old when it witnessed the most violent upheaval Roman Britain had ever seen.

[00:04:30]In 60 AD or 61 AD, Boudica, queen of the Iceni, led a revolt against Roman occupation.

[00:04:38]Her forces burned Camulodunum, modern Colchester, to the ground.

[00:04:43]They turned south and destroyed Londinium entirely, a settlement barely 17 years old wiped from the earth.

[00:04:50]Then, they marched on Verulamium and razed that, too.

[00:04:53]Three cities obliterated. Roman sources record approximately 400 Roman soldiers killed.

[00:04:59]Estimated British casualties at the final battle ran to 80,000, though historians regard that figure as almost certainly exaggerated.

[00:05:07]The final confrontation, known as the Battle of Watling Street, saw a vastly outnumbered Roman force crush Boudica's army in a single decisive engagement.

[00:05:17]Boudica died shortly afterwards, likely by her own hand.

[00:05:20]The battle's precise location remains genuinely unknown.

[00:05:24]Most historians place it somewhere in the West Midlands, possibly near Mancetter in Warwickshire >> [music] >> or Church Stowe in Northamptonshire.

[00:05:32]It did not take place on the London stretch of the road, but the road itself carried the legions who fought that battle.

[00:05:39]They marched this very section of gravel and chalk, heading southeast to regroup and northwest to engage.

[00:05:46]Watling Street [music] was the corridor through which the crisis moved.

[00:05:50]And when the crisis passed, the road remained.

[00:05:53]After Rome withdrew from Britain around 410 AD, the road did not vanish.

[00:05:59]Roman roads were engineered to last, and this one did.

[00:06:03]The Anglo-Saxons who settled in the river valleys of Kent and the Thames continued [music] to use it.

[00:06:08]They renamed it Watling Street, which evolved [music] over the centuries into Watling Street.

[00:06:14]No one maintained it in the Roman fashion. No one resurfaced it.

[00:06:19]But the route persisted because the geography that demanded it had not changed.

[00:06:24]London still sat where it sat.

[00:06:27]The Kent coast still faced the continent. And the road between them remained the most direct path.

[00:06:34]For centuries after the withdrawal, [music] the road's significance was primarily practical.

[00:06:39]It carried trade, livestock, >> [music] >> and travelers between London and the ports.

[00:06:44]There's no single dramatic event to anchor this period.

[00:06:48]It is a time of continuity and quiet use rather than spectacle.

[00:06:53]But continuity in a road nearly 2,000 years old is itself the story.

[00:06:59]By the medieval period, the road had taken on a different kind of significance entirely.

[00:07:04]It had become sacred ground.

[00:07:07]In 1170, [music] Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered inside Canterbury Cathedral by four knights, allegedly on [music] the orders of King Henry the II. He was canonized shortly after, and Canterbury became one of the most important [music] pilgrimage destinations in Christendom.

[00:07:25]Pilgrims setting out from London began their journey at Southwark Cathedral, then known as the Priory Church of St. Mary Overie, and walked southeast along what is now Old Kent Road.

[00:07:37]Their first stopping [music] point was a spot called St. Thomas a Waterings at the junction of what [music] is now Old Kent Road and Albany Road, where a small stream called the Earl's Sluice crossed the road. Horses drank from the stream and travelers rested before continuing south.

[00:07:53]Geoffrey Chaucer, writing his Canterbury [music] Tales in the 1380s, placed this exact spot in the opening pages of the poem.

[00:08:01]His pilgrims ride out from Southwark and pause at the watering of St. Thomas before continuing towards Kent.

[00:08:08]That stream no longer flows above ground, but the spot where Chaucer's pilgrims stopped is still identifiable.

[00:08:14]A public house called the Thomas a Becket stood at that location for centuries, the current building dating from 1898.

[00:08:22]It closed in 2018.

[00:08:25]The lake in Burgess Park, which sits beside Old Kent Road, is said to be where those pilgrims watered their horses.

[00:08:32]The same spot served a darker purpose.

[00:08:36]From the Tudor period until approximately 1740, St. Thomas a Waterings was a place of execution for the northern parts of Surrey.

[00:08:45]Criminals and religious dissenters were hanged here.

[00:08:50]In 1539, the Vicar of Wandsworth, his chaplain, and two members of his household were executed at this site for denying royal supremacy.

[00:09:00]The Earl's Sluice stream also marked the boundary between the Archbishop of Canterbury's authority and the jurisdiction of the City of London.

[00:09:08]The Lord Mayor once rode in procession each year to this point to inspect the boundary stones.

[00:09:13]Pilgrimage, execution, and political boundary, all converging on the same stretch of road.

[00:09:19]And the road's ceremonial significance was about to grow even further on the 25th [music] of October, 1415, Henry V of England defeated a vastly larger French army at the Battle of Agincourt during the Hundred Years' War.

[00:09:34]It was one [music] of the most celebrated English military victories of the medieval period.

[00:09:40]And when the king returned to London a month later, he came up the Old Kent Road.

[00:09:45]Henry had landed at Dover, stopped at Canterbury to visit Beckett's shrine, then crossed Blackheath, and rode northwest along the ancient road [music] into the city.

[00:09:55]The Lord Mayor and approximately 20,000 citizens on horseback [music] met him.

[00:09:59]The mayor and 24 aldermen wore scarlet.

[00:10:02]Lesser citizens dressed in red and white.

[00:10:06]As the royal procession turned into Borough High Street at St. George the Martyr Church, a choir sang the Deo gratias Anglia, now known as the Agincourt song.

[00:10:17]It was one of the great civic triumphs in London's history, and it processed along the same stretch of Roman gravel that the legions had marched nearly 1,400 years earlier.

[00:10:28]69 years before Henry's triumph, in 1381, Wat Tyler had led the peasants' revolt along this same stretch of road, marching followers from Canterbury to London in protest at the poll tax.

[00:10:43]The Kent Road was the route of dissent as well as devotion.

[00:10:47]In 1450, the road carried dissent again.

[00:10:51]Jack Cade, a mysterious figure possibly using the alias John Mortimer, led a rebellion of Kentish commons against the corrupt advisers of King Henry the VI.

[00:11:02]His manifesto, The Complaint of the Poor Commons of Kent, listed 15 grievances and five demands, including accusations of election rigging, extortion, and financial mismanagement.

[00:11:16]Around 5,000 men marched from Kent to London, traveling up the old road through what is now Old Kent Road, and assembling on Blackheath.

[00:11:27]The rebels [music] briefly entered the city.

[00:11:29]They executed the Lord Treasurer, Sir James Fiennes, and the Sheriff of Kent.

[00:11:34]They came close to taking the Tower of London.

[00:11:37]Citizens eventually turned against them, and a bloody battle was fought on London Bridge before the rebels accepted pardons and dispersed.

[00:11:45]Cade fled, but was mortally wounded near Heathfield in Sussex on the 12th of July, 1450, by the Sheriff of Kent, Alexander Iden.

[00:11:55]His corpse was beheaded.

[00:11:57]His head was placed on London Bridge.

[00:12:00]The rebellion was a direct precursor to the Wars of the Roses, and Shakespeare later dramatized it in Henry VI, Part 2, deepening the road's connection to English literature still further.

[00:12:13]Two centuries later, the road witnessed the opposite of rebellion.

[00:12:17]In May 1660, Charles II, returning from exile after the English Civil War, landed at Dover and made his way to London along the same route that every king, rebel, and pilgrim before him had traveled.

[00:12:32]The diarist, John Evelyn, recorded the scene, describing a procession of around 20,000 horse and foot, brandishing their swords and shouting with what he called inexpressible joy.

[00:12:44]The Restoration cavalcade spread across [music] the green spaces beside the Old Kent Road.

[00:12:50]Kings, rebels, [music] and pilgrims, all of them walked the same ground.

[00:12:55]The road carried them all indifferently.

[00:12:58]For most of its history, Old Kent Road was a rural thoroughfare.

[00:13:01]Fields and market gardens lined both sides.

[00:13:04]Coaching inns served travelers heading to and from the Kent coast.

[00:13:08]John Rocque's map of London from 1746 shows hedgerows along the road's course.

[00:13:13]It was still essentially countryside.

[00:13:16]That changed in 1807 when the Grand Surrey Canal reached Old Kent Road.

[00:13:22]Authorized by Parliament in 1801 and opened from the Thames at Rotherhithe, the canal's primary purpose was transporting timber from the Surrey Commercial Docks.

[00:13:32]It was extended to Camberwell in 1810 and Peckham [music] in 1826.

[00:13:37]The canal even had the first canal police in Britain.

[00:13:40]Bank rangers appointed in 1811 to patrol [music] the towpaths.

[00:13:45]Old Kent Road was humped at the canal crossing to allow vessels to pass beneath.

[00:13:51]The canal's arrival triggered the road's transformation from rural lane to industrial corridor.

[00:13:56]Within two decades, tanneries, soap factories, lime kilns, breweries, chemical works, and timber yards had clustered along the canal's banks near the road.

[00:14:06]The Kentish Drovers pub, which opened in 1840, took its name from the cattle drovers who still used the road to bring livestock up to the markets at Borough and Smithfield.

[00:14:16]The countryside [music] and the factories overlapped for a generation before industry won entirely.

[00:14:23]In the 1830s, part of the city's first suburban railway system built viaducts through South Bermondsey.

[00:14:30]By the 1840s, a new branch terminated at Bricklayers Arms station, which had become a goods-only depot by the 1850s after its short-lived passenger service failed.

[00:14:40]The railway viaducts largely defined the character of the surrounding streets for the next 150 years.

[00:14:48]Then came the gasworks.

[00:14:51]The South Metropolitan Gas Company was founded in 1829 and incorporated by Act of Parliament in 1842.

[00:15:01]Its works were established on the eastern side of Old Kent Road adjacent to the canal, allowing coal [music] to be delivered by barge from Rotherhithe.

[00:15:11]The works were completed by 1833.

[00:15:14]Under Thomas Livesey, appointed chief officer in 1839, the company introduced a workmen's sick fund, a superannuation fund, and paid holidays for workers.

[00:15:26]Progressive measures for the era and a hint of what his son would later achieve because the man who would truly define the gasworks had already arrived.

[00:15:34]George Livesey grew up in Canal Grove Cottages beside the gasworks and joined the company in 1848.

[00:15:41]He became chairman in 1885.

[00:15:44]Between 1879 and 1881, he built gas holder number 13 on the site.

[00:15:50]When it was completed, it was the largest gas holder in the world.

[00:15:54]It was also a radical piece of engineering.

[00:15:56]Livesey treated the guide frame as a cylindrical lattice shell, used mild steel for the first time in a gas holder bell, and featured wrought iron standards of exceptional thinness.

[00:16:07]The tank was the deepest then constructed. Its design [music] influenced the later development of helical and geodesic structures. It remains grade two listed by Historic England.

[00:16:17]But Livesey's legacy extended well beyond engineering. He introduced profit sharing for employees following labor disputes in 1889. In 1892, he pioneered a scheme that [music] installed gas supplies, lighting, and cookers in working-class homes at the company's expense recovered through a surcharge on bills.

[00:16:37]The scheme spread nationally and brought gas cooking to working-class families across Britain for the first time.

[00:16:44]In 1890, Livesey built and paid for the Camberwell Public Library number one on Old Kent Road giving it to the parish in perpetuity.

[00:16:52]It opened in October that year with 6,588 [music] volumes.

[00:16:57]The building later became the Livesey Museum for children, a free museum closed by Southwark Council in 2008 due to budget cuts.

[00:17:05]Because the building was given in perpetuity, the council could not sell it.

[00:17:10]It now operates as Theatre Peckham.

[00:17:12]A grade two listed statue of Livesey by sculptor Frederick Pomeroy still stands in the grounds.

[00:17:19]By the 1880s, the Old Kent Road was entirely built up.

[00:17:24]The gasworks had grown to 36 acres with eight enormous gas holders.

[00:17:29]Railway viaducts cut through the neighboring streets.

[00:17:32]The inner section of the road was renamed Tabard Street [music] in 1877 after the inn where Chaucer's pilgrims gathered. And the remaining stretch [music] was formally designated Old Kent Road.

[00:17:44]The countryside was gone.

[00:17:46]Industry had claimed it.

[00:17:48]If this is the kind of London history you find yourself wanting more of, subscribe.

[00:17:54]There are stories beneath every street [music] in this city, and we cover them regularly.

[00:17:58]And with industry came identity.

[00:18:01]In 1891, the actor and singer Albert Chevalier, was done.

[00:18:06]Known as the coster's laureate, [music] performed a new song.

[00:18:10]Its original title was simply Wot Cher?

[00:18:13]The subtitle, Knocked 'Em in the Old Kent Road, >> [music] >> became the name everyone remembered.

[00:18:19]The song tells the story of a poor Cockney family who inherit [music] a donkey shay from a wealthy uncle and parade it down the Old Kent Road to the amazement of their neighbors.

[00:18:28]It is a song about working-class pride and small-scale social triumph.

[00:18:33]And it cemented the road's place in Cockney folklore.

[00:18:37]Shirley Temple performed it in a Hollywood film in 1939.

[00:18:41]Fozzie Bear sang it on The Muppet Show.

[00:18:44]Possibly the most eccentric footnote in the road's 2,000 year history.

[00:18:48]44 years after that song, the road's reputation was sealed in a way that Albert Chevalier could never have predicted.

[00:18:56]In 1935, the Leeds-based publisher Waddingtons adapted the American board game Monopoly for the British market, replacing Atlantic City street names with London locations.

[00:19:08]The game itself has a contested history.

[00:19:11]Its true origins trace back to Elizabeth Magie, a stenographer who patented The Landlord's Game in 1904 to illustrate the economic theories of Henry George and demonstrate the injustices of land monopoly.

[00:19:24]She received $500 for her patent.

[00:19:27]Charles Darrow adapted the concept, sold it to Parker Brothers in 1935, and claimed credit for years.

[00:19:34]Waddingtons produced the British edition that same year.

[00:19:37]The streets chosen for the board were meant to reflect actual property values and social status in 1930s London.

[00:19:44]Old Kent Road, with its gasworks, its factories, and its [music] deeply working-class character, was the natural choice for the very bottom.

[00:19:53]The only Monopoly property south of the Thames, its American counterpart is Mediterranean Avenue.

[00:19:59]And from that moment on, a road with 2,000 years of history became shorthand for the cheapest thing on the board.

[00:20:07]Modern property data from 2021 shows average asking prices on Old Kent Road had reached approximately 1.18 million pounds.

[00:20:18]Mayfair, the board's most expensive square, averaged 6.9 million.

[00:20:24]Research recalculating the board using current values found Old Kent Road still sits at the bottom, though now because of its ongoing status as a regeneration area rather than the poverty of the 1930s.

[00:20:36]The board game froze a snapshot of London's class geography that the city itself [music] has been slowly rearranging ever since.

[00:20:44]But the board game was published in 1935, and in 1935, the road had bigger problems coming than its reputation.

[00:20:55]On the 7th of September, 1940, the first day of the Blitz, a high explosive bomb fell on Old Kent Road at approximately [music] 2 minutes past 6:00 in the evening.

[00:21:08]It struck the South Metropolitan Gasworks, destroying 3 million cubic feet of gas and severely damaging a gas holder.

[00:21:17]The gasworks, the canal, and the railway viaducts made this stretch of Southwark a prime target.

[00:21:25]The night before, Arnott Street, just off the Old Kent Road, was hit.

[00:21:31]12 people were killed.

[00:21:33]One survivor, Annie Leary, paralyzed in the blast, later told the Daily Express that Hitler could not break a Cockney's heart.

[00:21:43]The Livesey Museum building suffered bomb damage when a bomb intended for the gasworks narrowly missed its target.

[00:21:51]The Wellington Baths on the corner of Old Kent Road and Marlborough Grove were destroyed entirely.

[00:21:58]By 1945, large parts of Old Kent Road lay in ruins.

[00:22:04]The road that had survived the Roman withdrawal, the medieval revolts, and four centuries of industrial upheaval had been torn apart in 5 years of bombing.

[00:22:15]But it did not die.

[00:22:17]Post-war planners, guided by the 1943 Abercrombie County of London Plan, set out to separate housing from industry.

[00:22:26]Damaged streets were replaced with council housing estates, the Tustin estate among them, built on the site of terraced housing in the late 1960s.

[00:22:36]Burgess Park [music] was created as part of the post-war green space program, incorporating the lake where Chaucer's pilgrims >> [music] >> had once watered their horses.

[00:22:46]The Bricklayers Arms junction and flyover were also post-war additions to the streetscape.

[00:22:52]The Grand Surrey Surrey Canal closed progressively from the 1940s, its final sections shutting in the 1970s.

[00:23:01]Its route now roads and linear parks.

[00:23:04]The South Metropolitan Gas Company was nationalized on the 1st of May, 1949, becoming part of the Southeastern Gas Board, and eventually British Gas. The road's industrial era was ending.

[00:23:17]Through the later 20th century, Old Kent Road retained a fiercely working-class character.

[00:23:22]It was lined with pubs that locals remembered as resembling the Wild West.

[00:23:25]One unnamed late-night bar became notorious enough for a shooting to be recorded in local press accounts.

[00:23:32]A crime crackdown in the late 20th and early 21st centuries cleaned up much of the area, but resulted in the closure of most of its public houses.

[00:23:40]Today, only two pubs remain on the road itself, the Lord Nelson and the [music] Windsor.

[00:23:46]Large out-of-town style retail parks, Asda, B&Q, Currys, replaced the older terraced housing and small factories along stretches of the street.

[00:23:55]The road has also become notable for its cultural diversity, described in Southwark Council's own planning documents as embodying diversity and community spirit.

[00:24:05]The R. White's factory, which produced ginger beer, lemonade, and other soft drinks, opened on Old Kent Road in 1887, and operated for almost a century before demolition in the 1970s.

[00:24:18]A football pitch now sits on the site.

[00:24:20]The Camberwell Public Baths on Old Kent Road opened in 1905, offering Russian and Victorian-style Turkish baths.

[00:24:30]James Bond drove along the road in Ian Fleming's novel Moonraker, a detail that even Southwark Council sites in its own press materials.

[00:24:38]The road's 2,000-year habit of turning up [music] in unexpected corners of British culture has never quite stopped.

[00:24:46]On the walls of a building on Old Kent Road stands a large ceramic tile mural by the Polish-British artist Adam Kossowski, created in 1965.

[00:24:57]It depicts the road's history in chronological sequence.

[00:25:01]Romans, Canterbury [music] Pilgrims with a passage from Chaucer, Henry V's return from Agincourt, >> [music] >> Jack Cade's rebellion, Charles II's restoration, a Victorian Pearly family, and modern industrial South London.

[00:25:17]A second, smaller mural nearby shows Kent drovers herding livestock up to the Borough and Smithfield markets. 2,000 years of history compressed into glazed tiles on a wall that most people walk past without stopping.

[00:25:30]And now the road faces its most uncertain chapter yet.

[00:25:34]Southwark Council's Old Kent Road Area Action Plan, currently in its 2025 draft, sets out an ambitious vision.

[00:25:42]Approximately 20,000 new homes, including affordable housing, at least 10,000 new jobs, new community facilities and parks, and the transformation of the road into a new high street environment.

[00:25:56]The development covers roughly 155 hectares of predominantly brownfield land, an area described as equivalent to around 215 football pitches.

[00:26:06]Estimated [music] total investment runs to 15 billion pounds over the next 20 to 30 years.

[00:26:13]The council expected the full program to generate at least 100 million pounds per year in additional council tax and business rates.

[00:26:21]The entire plan was predicated on the Bakerloo Line extension, a Transport for London project to extend the Underground from Elephant & Castle through to Lewisham with two new stations on Old Kent Road.

[00:26:34]First proposed in 2014, backed by the council, the Greater London Authority, >> [music] >> Transport for London, and developers, and supported by over 2,000 local residents in consultations since 2015.

[00:26:49]Then in June 2025, Chancellor Rachel Reeves' spending review failed to allocate funding for the extension.

[00:26:56]Developers described the decision as having killed the regeneration of Old Kent Road.

[00:27:01]The area, they said, was now effectively undevelopable for high-density housing without underground connectivity.

[00:27:08]25,000 planned homes and 10,000 jobs are said to be at risk as of mid-2025.

[00:27:14]The situation remains unresolved.

[00:27:17]Which brings us back to the summer of 2024 and to the workers digging beneath the tarmac.

[00:27:23]The Roman road they uncovered was found as part of the early works for a low-carbon district heating network, a project designed to bring heat to 3,000 more council homes along Old Kent Road and reduce the borough's carbon footprint by approximately 11,100 tons per year.

[00:27:40]Workers building infrastructure for the future accidentally uncovered the infrastructure of the past.

[00:27:45]The discovery site, south of the junction of Old Kent Road and Ilderton [music] Road, will be marked by a commemorative sign on the adjacent railway bridge.

[00:27:54]The archaeologist Dave [music] Taylor, who managed the excavation for the Museum of London Archaeology, described it as remarkable that the road survived almost 2,000 years given the sewers, cables, tramlines, and modern construction [music] piled on top of it.

[00:28:10]Gillian King, director of archaeology at RPS Consulting, called it a key finding for archaeological research for London, one that also informs on Roman construction techniques more broadly.

[00:28:23]The road has always attracted institutions that serve the overlooked.

[00:28:28]The Deaf and Dumb Asylum, the first school for deaf and [music] mute children established in England, was founded at Fort Place in Bermondsey in 1792 and later relocated to Old Kent Road.

[00:28:43]Its foundation stone laid by the Duke of Gloucester [music] in 1807.

[00:28:49]A road built for soldiers became a road for pilgrims, then a road for workers, then a road for the forgotten.

[00:28:58]The pattern has never really changed.

[00:29:01]The road today runs for roughly 2 miles from the Bricklayers Arms Junction to New Cross, where it crosses into Lewisham.

[00:29:10]That boundary, the point where Old Kent Road becomes New Cross Road, was once the historic county line between Surrey and Kent.

[00:29:19]The modern road is part of the A2, still following largely the same alignment the Romans established nearly 2,000 years ago.

[00:29:26]Legions marched this ground. Pilgrims prayed along it.

[00:29:30]A king rode home from Agincourt on it.

[00:29:32]Rebels marched to overthrow a government on it. A gasworks engineer built the largest gas holder in the world beside it.

[00:29:39]A music hall singer immortalized it. A board game made it a punchline.

[00:29:44]German bombs tried [music] to destroy it. And beneath all of that, beneath the tarmac and the cables and the centuries of use, the Roman road is still there.

[00:29:52]Still holding everything up. Still doing its job.