Guildhall Art Gallery and Roman Amphitheatre

The City of London’s Guildhall Art Gallery has been rehung with a focus on nineteenth-century paintings by Constable, Leighton, Millais, Rossetti, Holman Hunt and others. Downstairs, there are absorbing paintings of London from the 1660s to the present, from moving depictions of war and melancholy working streets to the likes of the grandiloquent (and never-enacted) George Dance plan for a new London Bridge. The collection’s centrepiece is the massive ‘Siege of Gibraltar’ by John Copley, which spans two entire storeys of the purpose-built gallery. A sub-basement contains the scant remains of London’s 6,000-seater Roman amphitheatre, built around AD70; Tron-like figures and crowd sound effects give a quaint inkling of scale.