Guildhall Art Gallery

The Guildhall Art Gallery is the art museum of the City of London Corporation, housed in a postmodern stone building of 1999 that defers quietly to the medieval Guildhall complex next door. The civic collection numbers about 4,000 works from the seventeenth century to the present, with a strong run of Victorian painting and Pre-Raphaelite works; the largest item is John Singleton Copley's The Defeat of the Floating Batteries of 1782, at 7.5 metres tall the biggest painting in Britain. The real surprise is in the basement: during construction in 1988 workmen uncovered the wall of the Roman amphitheatre of Londinium, the only known Roman amphitheatre in the City. The ruins are now dramatically lit and brought to life with projections. Free entry.