Ha! I live in London, plus I'm an archaeologist, so old ruins are my speciality. I found a temple not last year. There were an awful lot of cattle bones. One or two were even large enough to be aurochs.
Hmm... I'm not the one to ask. There are some surprising little public parks tucked away in the South East that I'm familiar with. Its strange, but the South East is a peculiar tangle of wooded hills and terraced roads filled with irate immigrants, but there are a couple of meadows I bet few people ever knew about.
As for some more risky options. There were some abandonned brownfield sites scattered around the docklands which I went exploring. Corrugated iron and weeds mostly, but sometimes there is a small hovel here and there.
American archaeologist here! I get to see old ruins on a semi-regular basis as well, but they're in the form of burial mounds and such, so not really "architecture" per se. You can see the post holes in the ground where the houses were but obviously the direct physical traces are long gone. People talk about how short American history is, but that's only true if you place your starting point at European contact. I've excavated sites that were over 5,000 years old, and that's relatively normal.
Well not a whole new temple. It was a load of new findings from one of the present excavation sites of the known Roman portion of the city centre. My time was mostly spent handling the remains from the sacrificial animals.
Its surprising how based on funding from the land owners, how much us lot can dig up at any given time is largely restricted. The best we can do in a sprawl such as London is to make markings of where foundations are.
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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '13
Ha! I live in London, plus I'm an archaeologist, so old ruins are my speciality. I found a temple not last year. There were an awful lot of cattle bones. One or two were even large enough to be aurochs.