The London Stone

A stone older than its first mention

The surviving block measures 53 by 43 by 30 centimetres and is the top of something considerably larger. Petrological opinion points to Clipsham limestone from Rutland or to Bath stone, both standard material for Roman and medieval building in London. The earliest firm reference is a property list compiled between 1098 and 1108 naming a man as Eadwaker æt lundene stane, Eadwaker at London Stone, and the name itself is recorded from around 1100. It was prominent enough to identify people by: Henry fitz-Ailwin, the first Mayor of London, in office from about 1189, took his surname from living beside it. What it was originally for has never been established. The prevailing view among specialists is that it formed part of the entrance to the Roman governor's palace, which stood nearby. It has also been argued to be a Roman milliarium, a distance marker, and, on no evidence at all, a Druidic altar.

Jack Cade's sword

In 1450 the rebel leader Jack Cade entered London, struck the stone with his sword, and declared himself Lord of this city. Shakespeare put the scene into Henry VI, Part 2 and fixed it in the popular memory. No contemporary account explains what the gesture meant or why the stone was the thing to strike, which leaves the most famous moment in the object's history as opaque as the object.

The prophecy is Victorian

"So long as the Stone of Brutus is safe, so long shall London flourish" gets quoted everywhere as ancient. It was written in the 1860s by a Welsh clergyman named Richard Williams Morgan and appears in no source earlier than his own. There is a genuine medieval thread underneath it: a fourteenth-century chronicle states that Brut sett Londen ston, crediting the legendary Trojan founder of Britain, though that tradition stayed obscure for centuries. The famous line is a piece of nineteenth-century invention that took.

Moved, walled up, exhibited, returned

The stone was shifted from the middle of the roadway to the north side of Cannon Street in 1742. Between 1798 and the 1820s it was set into the wall of St Swithin's church. When the church was demolished it went into a Portland stone alcove at 111 Cannon Street in 1962. It spent 2016 to 2018 at the Museum of London while the building above was redeveloped, and returned in October 2018 to a new plinth and Portland casing, where it sits at pavement level behind glass.

Free, outdoors, and visible at any hour. The stone sits at pavement level in the frontage of 111 Cannon Street, directly across from Cannon Street station, behind a glazed grille with an explanatory panel. There is nothing to book and nobody to ask.

It is small and easy to walk straight past, which most people do. The City empties at weekends, so a Sunday visit gets you the street to yourself, while on a weekday you will be reading the panel in a stream of commuters. Pair it with the Roman Temple of Mithras a few minutes west, which sits beneath a modern office building and is also free to enter.