Those walles of stone, as they were described by John Stow in , encircled the City of London, shaping both the urban footprint of the city and its social practices (Stow). Originally built as a Roman fortification for the provincial city of Londinium in the second century C.E., the London Wall remained a material and spatial boundary for the city throughout the early modern period. Described by Stow as high and great, the London Wall dominated the cityscape and spatial imaginations of Londoners for centuries. Increasingly, the eighteen-foot high wall created a pressurized constraint on the growing city; the various gates functioned as relief valves where development spilled out to occupy spaces outside the wall. Various church names in London today, such as St. Botolph-without-Aldgate, still retain the designation of their location within or without the city wall and a major street along the wall’s route bears the name of London Wall.

The London Wall started at the River Thames, near the eastern side of the White Tower in the Tower of London complex. From there, the wall ran north by northwest, crossing Tower Hill to Aldgate. At Aldgate it changed direction, running west by northwest to Bishopsgate. Continuing west from Bishopsgate, the wall began a long, almost straight stretch along the northern side of the city, ending at a bastion that still stands in the Churchyard of St. Giles, Cripplegate. Here the wall turned south, running parallel to Monkwell Street and Noble Street, before making an irregular jog to the west again. From there, the wall continued past Aldersgate before turning, just south of St. Bartholomew the Great, south toward the river, crossing Newgate Street and Ludgate Hill. From there, the exact course to the Thames is unknown, as the path of the Roman wall had been changed in the medieval era (Bell 23-24). In the later fourth-century C.E., the Romans extended the wall along the River Thames, a site of current archaeological interest (Smith), fully walling in the city. The riverside Roman wall, eroded by the elements, had collapsed by the twelfth-century. The last riverside portions of the wall were pulled down, with Thames Street laid out along its former course (Merrifield 222).

Because the wall had an extensive history of being rebuilt and reinforced, the materials that made up the wall varied. An imposing eighteen feet high, the majority of the wall was built of Kentish rag-stone most likely harvested in the Maidstone district in Kent. The wall was originally built on a foundation constructed of flints and puddled clay often mixed with broken pieces of rag-stone. The external base of the wall, or the plinth, contains material made primarily of sandstone, also believed to be of Kentish origin. The base was then reinforced with a triple layer of brick. The stone of both the interior and exterior faces of the wall is coarse and set in a hard, white mortar (Cook 1-7). To further protect the integrity of the wall and to keep the construction level, double or triple rows of flat, red tiles were laid for every four to five courses of stone (English Heritage). Additional measures were taken as the wall aged in order to reinforce its outer and inner defenses. Originally, the wall was supplemented by an external ditch, ranging from about 10.5 to 15 feet from the base. An earthen bank was built up against it, and further defensive techniques were put in place in the form of additional, semi-circular bastions on the wall’s exterior (Cook 1-7; Stow).

In addition to its functions of security and boundary marking, the wall also served governmental monitoring functions, controlling ingress and egress, and, as such, registered in the literary imagination of London writers.

The wall of the ancient and famous City of London is depicted on the Agas map as a significant dividing line, keeping the inner city contained and rural practices strictly outside the wall. Strikingly, there are no human figures depicted within the enclosure of the wall. In this way, the urban space of the map adopts emerging cartographic practices of Ptolemaic-based mapping, emphasizing place names and linearity, while the surrounding countryside displays ethnographic practices of the medieval mappa mundi (Roland 128) as well as early modern landscape representations. The difference in shading between the top of the wall and the bottom on the Agas map suggests keen attentiveness to the realistic depiction of the multiple materials used to erect and maintain the wall. The main gates that allow passage in and out of the city, and the bastions in between, are prominently featured on the map.

There are two cartouches engraved on the Agas map, one poetic and the other a laudatory introduction to the City of London. The two cartouches, located near the bottom of the map, connect London to a mythological Roman heritage, each proudly stating that the city was founded by Brute the Trojan who, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s , had come from Troy to claim a new land for himself and his people. The text of the prose cartouche emphasizes the fact that London was bounded: it is compaſſed with corne & paſture ground and incloſed with the river of Thames. The poetic cartouche, in contrast, points to King Lud’s increasing of the bounds of the city. On the map, many buildings push up against the very perimeter of the wall, enacting this process of exceeding the Roman-built boundaries. Compared to the openness of the countryside, London inside the city walls is compact, made up only of largely contiguous buildings. The people working the land, playing, fighting, or navigating boats along the Thames serve as a pastoral contrast to the crowded built environment inside the wall.

The cartouches not only proclaim London’s imperial history but also praise its abundant natural resources: London’s very good soyle, the Thames’s provision of all kind of fresh water-fish and a navigation system that bringeth abundance of commodities from all parts of the world. By incorporating Geoffrey of Monmouth’s myth of the founding of London, referenced in later works from to Holinshed’s , the Agas map makes a claim that London, with its ample resources and prime location, is the global successor to the legacy of Rome. The decorative banner at the top of the map reinforces this message, by proclaiming the Latin title to be the subject of the map.

By the time the Agas map was completed in 1561, London was pushing past the confines of the wall. But the Great Fire of 1666 provided the definitive blow to the definition of the city as primarily enclosed within the London Wall. There had long been warnings of the potential for a destructive fire due to London’s narrow streets, thatched roofs, and strong east winds, all exacerbated by the unusually hot, dry summer of 1666. London was built mainly out of timber construction and the summer’s drought had drastically depleted the city’s water reserves (Robinson). Due to the high death rate from the plague, fires were the last thing on Londoner’s minds, the warnings were largely disregarded, and few precautions were taken. In the late hours of 2 September 1666, a spark in a baker’s unextinguished oven set the Great Fire in motion: the fire spread quickly, jumping over twenty houses at a time while gathering force from combustibles such as hemp, oil, tallow, hay, timber, coal, and spirits. Citizens began tearing down buildings, desperately hoping to widen the gap between buildings and deprive the fire of further fuel. Four days after the fire began, however, 13,200 houses, 84 churches, and 44 company halls had been destroyed, along with a third of London Bridge. Fewer than ten lives were lost, but 373 acres of land, approximately 80% of the interior walled London, had burned (). Almost 100,000 people (1/6 of London’s population) became homeless (Robinson). Most of these homeless camped outside the walls of London; due to soaring rent rates from lack of housing, most eventually moved to other villages or found accommodation outside the city walls. Wealthier families began building larger residences, claiming valuable space within the city.

The fire irrevocably altered the spatial constructs of London: in October 1666, Charles II and the City appointed Commissioners to preside over the rebuilding of London. The gates damaged by the Great Fire, Ludgate, Newgate, and Moorgate, were rebuilt by the end of the 1670s (Hughes). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the gates, now superfluous in regulating egress and ingress, were removed (Schofield). Surviving sections of the wall remain visible in London today and parts of the riverside wall can be seen within the Tower of London (). Near the current site of the Museum of London, sections of the wall and the ruins of one of the bastions still stand (). Neighborhoods around London still bear the names of the historic gates, providing a linguistic trace of the initial plan of the City of London.

By the time the Agas map was created, the city had rebuilt and repurposed the Wall, re-territorializing the city’s prior position as a colonized province of Rome. Sigmund Freud suggested a phantasy using the city of Rome as an analogy for the complexity of human memory in which all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one (Freud 18). If we want to represent historical sequence in spatial terms, Freud suggested, we can only do it by juxtaposition in space (Freud 19). While Freud ultimately rejects this pictorial model of human memory, this juxtaposition in space of the Roman wall amid the development of the city, asserted a visible, if fragmentary, trace of London’s Roman past as part of early modern English culture. Remnants of the past remain within the wall’s multiple layers and fragmentary remains, often side-by-side with contemporary streets and buildings, revealing a history of inspiration, exclusion, and control, and continuing to define the geographical and cultural space of modern day London.