For as long as there have been people on these islands, there has been a river crossing where today stands the Tower of London. Roughly made rafts would have been the first vessels to ferry travellers over the River Thames across what was then a shallow expanse of water twice as wide as it is today. Then along came Julius Caesar with his "Veni, Vedi, Vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered). You can see he was not a humble man but, whatever his faults, he was brilliant at drainage and soon had the river narrowed and firmly routed between banks and deep enough to take galleons. The Romans built a stockade of wood around both fortresses on either side of the Thames which was the beginning of the wall around London.
   Once they had time to do the job thoroughly, the Romans used massive boulders, as much as twelve feet thick at the bottom, to build an impenetrable barrier thirty feet high around an area of fifty acres on the north side of the river. The engineers from Rome built four fortified gates in the wall and gave them the most unexciting names of North, South, East and West. A thousand years later, with the wall and gates much altered both in position and appearance, the Londoners decided to grace their gate facing north with the mysterious name "Bishopsgate," strange because nobody knew who the bishop may have been. In fact it was not a great clergyman at all that the gate was named after, but a hot steaming drink that all travellers looked forward to when arriving in London.