Rush hour, by chariot

Boadicea may have had bumpier roads to deal with, but even the most pot-holed track in 60AD can't have been as trying as the rush-hour traffic in 2002 Londinium. It was 8am, it was blowing a gale, and the capital's workers were late already. Being held up by a horse-drawn chariot, even if it was an exact copy of the Iceni queen's, was the last thing they wanted.

"Oi!", bellowed one rather frightening looking man out of his van window, as he cut us up in Trafalgar Square. "Oi!" shouted a despatch rider as his 100 horsepower motorbike roared past our two horsepower chariot, which was recreated in a project by BBC2's Meet The Ancestors programme.

Mike Loades, my charioteer from Kirkcudbrightshire, wasn't fazed but the ponies, Freddy and Joey, are more used to Berkshire fields than choked London highways and they weren't happy. By the time Freddy had trotted to the Mall he had had enough, and bucked wildly. Nothing Boadicea didn't have to deal with, I thought, and Mike and I clung on, marvelling at the chariot's suspension. Freddy's mood recovered in front of Buckingham Palace, and he trotted through the Hyde Park traffic like a dream.

Our journey from the British Museum to Hyde Park had taken just under an hour at about 9.9mph - the average, somewhat sedate speed of London traffic today - and that was taking advantage of bus lanes. It was surprisingly comfortable and no one was injured. But by the time I climbed out of the rickety-looking thing I didn't know whether I was shaking from fear, the freezing cold, or both.

Science Correspondent Geraint Smith writes: This first credible reconstruction of Boadicea's chariot, could hardly be more different from the commonly-held romantic image of the warrior queen's vehicle of terror, the sabre-wheeled vehicle immortalised in bronze on the Embankment.

Yet careful research and practical skills suggest this comparatively fragile gig, made almost entirely of wood and rawhide, was one of the last sights that the inhabitants of Roman Londinium saw in 60AD as a vengeful British army 100,000 strong swept in to raze it to the ground and put them to torture, sword and flame.

The reconstruction, now on permanent display in the British Museum's Great Court, also shows how the legendary Celtic fighters could use a chariot as a mobile weapons platform, accurately hurling javelins at opposing troops while travelling fast over rough ground.

The project to recreate it involved Dr JD Hill of the British Museum - one of the world's leading experts on Iron Age Britain - a wheelwright, a knot-tier, metal workers and horse trainers. The spark was the discovery at Wetwang in Yorkshire of a grave containing the remains of an Iron Age woman and a chariot; bones, small pieces of corroded metal and stains in the soil.

Drawn by two small ponies, the chariot can get up to about 20mph... though that is not what the drivers in Trafalgar Square and at Hyde Park Corner will tell you.