They made a special barge and towed it all the way to the north bank of the River Thames in central London, where it still stands. By the end of the 18th Century, Alexander the Great's city had simply fallen over and had been buried by time. But much of it survives under the ground. When people began to build again on the same site in the 19th Century, a new cosmopolitan city rose on the ruins and sealed them. Basements and foundations in those days did not disturb the archaeology, while the rest of the ancient city lay just offshore on the bed of the eastern harbour.
Archaeologists say the seabed is littered with bits of ancient buildings and statues.
And divers have described swimming up to the granite face of a sphinx that had been crouching in the sand for more than 1,500 years since a catastrophic earthquake changed the contours of the city. The fact is that one of the least known but richest, biggest and most important cities of the ancient world, is simply waiting to be re-discovered. Re-development should be giving archaeologists windows through which to record unknown details of the Greek and Roman townscapes. That is the theory, but in practice once a site is cleared developers move in mechanical diggers that overnight can easily scoop up 10 metres of ancient remains and dump them into skips. At one building site I found archaeologists locked out even though they held a permit to excavate.