A weird tunnel beneath Charing Cross station traces the edge of what was once London’s riverside embankment, a waterfront that witnessed the arrival of Viking raiding fleets.

Queenhithe is the only surviving section of the City of London’s ancient riverfront: excavations from here and neighbouring Bull Wharf have revealed evidence of London’s early medieval role in international trade – including the largest concentration of Viking artefacts in Britain outside York.

London’s walls may have been built by the Romans, but when the Vikings encountered them in the tenth and eleventh centuries ‘they suffered’, as the anonymous Anglo-Saxon chronicler put it, ‘more harm and injury than they ever imagined that any town-dwellers would do to them’.

This viewpoint details the history of the building and design of Somerset House