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Archaeologists did not find an intact Roman fresco in Southwark. They recovered thousands of shattered pieces of painted plaster, mixed together in a demolition pit, then painstakingly matched fragments to reconstruct designs that had covered around twenty interior walls. The paintings reveal vivid decoration, Roman artistic connections and a tantalising fragment of a painter’s signature—but the building’s purpose and the painter’s identity remain unknown.
What was found in Southwark?
The painted plaster came from an early Roman building at the Liberty development site in Southwark, London. According to Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), the building was demolished at some point before AD 200. During that demolition, plaster from around twenty interior walls was dumped in a pit and broken into thousands of pieces.
The find is therefore a reconstruction from debris, not a painting still attached to its original wall. Because fragments from different walls had been jumbled together, specialists first had to sort them and work out how their painted surfaces related to one another.
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How did specialists piece the paintings together?
Han Li, MOLA’s Senior Building Material Specialist, spent months laying out and matching the delicate fragments. Li described the work as “assembling the world’s most difficult jigsaw puzzle”—a description of the challenge, not a measured ranking of restoration projects. Senior Illustrator Faith Vardy then began reconstructing the painted designs from the assembled evidence.
Li told MOLA that starting the work brought “a mix of excitement and nervousness.” The scale of the task lay not only in the number of pieces but in the need to distinguish fragments from multiple walls and interpret designs that survived only in broken sections. As Li put it, “These discoveries act as a window to the everyday past.”
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What did the Roman wall paintings look like?
MOLA describes a striking scheme of bright yellow panels separated by black intervals, alongside images of birds, fruit and lyres. The yellow panel style is rare in Britain; MOLA says it is known at only a few sites, including Fishbourne Roman Palace.
Some fragments imitate costly decorative stones: red Egyptian porphyry and African giallo antico. Such painted imitations brought the look of prestigious materials into interior decoration without the wall itself being made from those stones.
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The compositions have parallels with Roman wall painting at Xanten, Cologne and Lyon, as well as sites including Londinium, Colchester and Pompeii. These comparisons place the Southwark decoration within a wider Roman visual culture. They do not prove that the painters came from any particular city or that they directly copied a specific surviving work.
What do the inscriptions tell us?
A broken painter’s signature
One plaster fragment bears the word “FECIT,” Latin for “has made this,” inside a tabula ansata—a decorative tablet used for signatures in the Roman world. MOLA calls it the first known example of this kind in Britain. The plaster breaks where the painter’s name would have appeared, so the inscription offers no way to identify the artist.
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An etched Greek alphabet
Another fragment carries an almost complete Greek alphabet etched into the plaster. MOLA describes this as the only known example of such an inscription from Roman Britain. Examples from Italy suggest it may have served as a checklist, tally or reference, but its purpose at Southwark has not been established.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What else may be visible in the fragments?
MOLA has identified a fragment that appears to show a crying woman; the hairstyle may date to the Flavian dynasty, AD 69–96. Both the figure’s identification and the dating suggested by the hairstyle are tentative. Other fragments may preserve guidelines made by a painter for an unpainted flower, another interpretation that remains provisional.
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What was the building used for?
Its function is still under investigation. MOLA has raised the possibility that it had a partly commercial role, perhaps connected with storing or distributing vessels brought to London by ship. That is a working possibility, not a confirmed identification. Further study and comparison with other Roman wall paintings continue.
Why this reconstruction matters
The plaster preserves more than attractive motifs: its panel scheme, images, material imitations and inscriptions provide evidence about how Roman interiors were decorated and how painters marked or planned their work. The fragments also show the limits of what survives. They can reveal stylistic connections and traces of artistic practice, but they cannot yet name the painter or settle the building’s use.
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