Lies Sleeping

HISTORICAL AND TECHNICAL NOTES

The Whitechapel Bell Foundry was a real place up until April 2017, when it left London to be replaced, no doubt, by a boutique hotel, some luxury flats and a coffee shop. All the workers described in this book are 100% made up and any resemblance to any real person living or dead is completely coincidental.

The London Mithraeum has been returned to its original location, thanks to Bloomberg, and is now open to the public. I’ve visited and it’s worth a look, although I prefer to think of it as the Temple of Bacchus – a deity who seems much more in keeping with the spirit of London than grumpy old Mithras. I also find it a comforting to think that somewhere in the City under all that money and modernist concrete is a Temple of Isis – unless it’s under St Paul’s, that is.

The skulls in the Walbrook are now thought to have been washed there by occasional floods from graveyards outside the Roman city boundaries, rather than being the victims of Boudicca’s sack of Londinium. This probably won’t be the last time Peter jumps to a conclusion based on evidence that is later disproved.