The Independent View: Bloomberg's Next Empire

It is the biggest development in London's buzzing financial district, two bronze-and-stone towers, connected by sky-bridges atop the ruins of a 2,000-year-old Roman temple. The three-acre site is just yards from the River Thames and alongside a huge building project for new offices on Queen Victoria Street in the heart of London's financial district and is also home to the Temple of Mithras.

Bloomberg Place, roughly the size of a Manhattan city block, is the future European home of Michael R. Bloomberg’s company and charity. But it is only one piece of the New York City mayor’s growing British empire. He is underwriting a major expansion of one of England’s most prestigious galleries, Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, designed by the noted architect Zaha Hadid.

Mr. Bloomberg, an Anglophile with a taste for English Regency style, is exporting his vast quantities of financial, social and political capital to this ancient city, where he has long yearned for influence. He threw himself into the city’s cultural scene, joining the boards of the Serpentine and the Old Vic theater. In a country where the government often financed the arts, Mr. Bloomberg adopted a more American style of corporate giving, stamping his name in museums where he paid for audio guides and sponsoring the Royal Court theater’s “Bloomberg Mondays,” when tickets are sold at a discount. He bought a box at Ascot, the high-society horse racing grounds.

Bloomberg Place, soon to be enshrined on the London map, is currently a mud pit crawling with cranes and bulldozers. By 2016, it will be home to a futuristic campus designed by the architect Norman Foster: it is to include a pair of undulating office buildings, pedestrian plazas, spaces for 390 bicycles and, if the mayor gets his way, branches of New York restaurants.

In one corner of the development sits the Temple of Mithras, Walbrook, a relic from London’s days under Roman rule. First uncovered in 1954, the temple, a sacrificial altar for an ancient religion, is being restored at Mr. Bloomberg’s expense.

Thousands of Roman artefacts have been unearthed in an archaeological dig hailed as 'the most important excavation ever held in London'. Archaeologists have found coins, pottery, shoes, lucky charms and an amber Gladiator amulet which date back almost 2,000 years. Experts leading the excavation have also uncovered wooden structures from the 40s AD around 40ft beneath the ground.

The discoveries have been so well preserved in the muddy waters of the lost Walbrook River that archaeologists have nicknamed the site 'the Pompeii of the North'. Sadie Watson, the site director from the Museum of London Archaeology, said: 'Certainly the archaeology on this project so far is probably the most important excavation ever held within London, certainly within Roman London.

It has offered experts an unprecedented glimpse into life in the bustling centre of Roman Londinium. Archaeologists from the museum were able to excavate the area when work to build the vast Bloomberg Place development began. Since then around 10,000 accessioned finds have been discovered by 60 archaeologists, the largest haul of small finds to have ever been recovered on a single excavation in the capital.

More than 100 fragments of Roman writing tablets have been unearthed, while 700 boxes of pottery fragments will be analysed by specialists. This site has provided the largest quantity of Roman leather to have ever been unearthed in the capital, including hundreds of shoes.

Sophie Jackson, from the museum, said: 'The site is a wonderful slice through the first four centuries of London's existence. The waterlogged conditions left by the Walbrook stream have given us layer upon layer of Roman timber buildings, fences and yards, all beautifully preserved and containing amazing personal items, clothes and even documents - all of which will transform our understanding of the people of Roman London.'