Billingsgate Roman House and Baths

You are now looking at the underfloor heating system for the suite of rooms in the east wing. A single internal corridor gave access to these heated living rooms that originally may have had mosaic floors. Excavations on the other side of the bathhouse have uncovered a parallel drainage ditch and first century wooden piles reinforcing the river bank. There may have been a west wing on top of this, but there is insufficient evidence to prove this beyond doubt.

This is the frigidarium, the coldest room in the bathhouse.

Bathers would enter from the main house and hang their clothing in this room before acclimatising to the heat in the tepidarium and then proceeding into the caldarium. The bather’s final stop on his or her tour through the bathhouse would be back in the frigidarium where pores that were opened and thoroughly cleaned were closed with a dousing from the cold water tank on the south wall of the frigidarium.

The tepidarium was the warm room of the bathhouse, where bathers would acclimatise before entering the caldarium.

There is evidence suggesting that Romans were depilated in the tepidarium. Depilation consisted of having your body hairs plucked out, as hairless bodies were fashionable during much of the Roman Empire. One man who lived above the baths complained of the

“hair-plucker with his penetrating shrill voice - for purposes of advertisement - continually giving it vent and never holding his tongue except when he is plucking the armpits and making his victim yell”
- Seneca, Epistle 56.2

The walls of the frigidarium are very thick and built side-by-side with the heated rooms. There is a theory that the frigidarium was from an earlier building that was converted into a bathhouse as the walls of the heated rooms have not been made fast with the frigidarium, there is a gap between them. This suggests that the cold room was a pre-existing building.

You are now looking out over the hot room (caldarium) of the bathhouse.

At 50°C the caldarium was the hottest room in the bathhouse. Bathers would be massaged with various perfumed oils that were carried in glass flasks, after which the excess oil and dirt were scraped off with a metal instrument called a strigil.

Surprisingly, these baths used little water, apart from a possible water tank to wash yourself down with at the end of your stay.

The small stacks of bricks, called pilae, are evidence of a Roman system of underfloor heating; the floor of the house and bathhouse would have been supported on top of this heated space, called a hypocaust (‘a furnace that heats from below’).

The underfloor airspace between the pilae would have been heated by a furnace (praefurnium) that was usually in a room next to an outside wall of the building. The hot air and combustion gases circulated under the floor and were drawn up into the walls through hollow rectangular flue tiles called tubuli. Similar flue tiles below the floor connected the hypocausts in different rooms around the house. Rooms that needed to be the hottest were usually closer to the furnace. The furnace is the small arch in the far wall of the caldarium. The hypocaust system in this complex of buildings had both wall and floor heating.