This video is part of Vikings Month.

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London, home to some 20 million people.

Land of craft beer, business, modernity, still growing every day.

It's hard to imagine this place before the skyscrapers, the underground, before the urban sprawl kicked in.

Yet, long ago, there was a time before all of this took hold.

There's been a settlement here for as long as permanent settlements have existed in Britain.

A strategically important crossroads on the River Thames, the Great Waterway which cuts

a swath through southern Britain.

These same waters that still bring people into the city today have done so since at least

Neolithic times.

Perhaps some of the relatives of those who built Stonehenge, not too far away.

Later, this was a home to Bronze Age pastoralists, a fortress of the Celts, and finally, the Romans

their special talent, always being to build on the foundations of those who came before.

Though the city was sacked by the Isini warrior queen Budica in 60 AD, for two centuries after the Roman conquest of Britain, Lundinium thrived as the greatest metropolis

of Britannia.

Home to some 60,000 people at its height.

The city wall here was the second largest construction project ever undertaken in Roman

Britain. Home to legionaries, merchants and mercenaries, hailing from as far away as the deserts of Africa

and the mountains of the Black Sea.

It was under Roman direction that London first became a thriving international city akin to the one we see today.

By the time the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century AD,

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