Fieldwork Review - Thames Discovery Programme

It's lovely to see so many friendly faces and familiar faces here. How do you follow traps and trolleys? I have no idea, we should try. Those of you who have been to the Greenwich foreshore but not recently will notice there's something very different about the image in front of you, in particular this rock armouring in front of the river wall. As you may know, Greenwich is one of our fastest eroding sites and has been for many years and the erosion has got to the stage where the foundations of the river wall were starting to be undercut. So as a result of that, over the winter this rock armoury was was dumped down on the foreshore. It wasn't dumped, it was done under archaeological supervision. So I'm just going to run through how that process happened. We did a final geomatic survey followed by a final walkover survey by the TDP team and then sand was poured over the archaeological features. Here's our remains of our possible Tudor river wall there. So sand was poured over it before taram, it's a geotextile, was then laid over the top and then the rock armour bags were placed very gently on top of that. So everything was protected before the rock armour went down and while that works okay with flat structures such as our river wall base, things like this timber here, sorry for blinding you Helen, we did a slightly different technique. We'd done this at the Tower Beach about four or five years ago, maybe not so long, and what we did we put sandbags around the upstanding features. In this case we tried a new method, we made little taram sort of packages around them and filled them with sand and then placed the rock armour around them. So again even not just the flat stuff but the upstanding stuff was also protected and the the piles at the back of the river wall, right on the river wall for those of you who know them, which were put in initially to protect the foundations, they too were covered over with sand before the rock armouring was placed over on top and so the whole process was done under archaeological supervision. The features, we'll probably not see them for, I don't know, 30, 40, 50 years, probably not in my lifetime, but the archaeology is preserved and protected underneath so the foreshore archaeologists of the future will get to have a look at it eventually. And we also did a week of field work at Greenwich with our first new intake of frogs this year, welcome to those of you who are here, but I'm not going to talk about that I should save the suspense for Helen's talk to follow. We then went to Surrey Ducks Farm for our next intake of new frogs this year, welcome to you those of you who are here, where apparently we found some things like this and I don't know what that is. We found some very interesting things as well at Surrey Ducks Farm. Because it was a ship building site, how interesting, it's the one site I think me and Matt actually agree we both like. One of the things we found was this sluice, possibly originally to do with a dry dock at Wells Shipyard. Different phases of it, some of it brick and going into the 19th century, but down towards the water's edge up here, it was made of reused ships planks. You can see quite clearly here, or if it was darker you might be able to see quite clearly, there are channels in these bits of planking. What's weird is some of our research on ship breaking is we don't seem to have documentary evidence of the big private ship builders like Wells or Randalls breaking up ships, certainly not warships anyway, but here we've clear evidence of reused vessel timbers on a ship building site. As I said there's no evidence of being warships, it's possible these are merchant ships they're breaking up or possibly East Indiamen. Again further research is required but it's quite interesting because it doesn't fit at all with the documentary evidence. Maybe it's a result for repair, that's also a possibility, but just something, an oddity that came up this year. We also found more bits of nautical stuff and this is part of the midsection of a Thames sailing barge. We'd seen bits of it before but we've never seen quite so much as this. For those of you who don't know what a Thames sailing barge looks like, that's a Thames sailing barge. Gratuitous insertion of ship picture, it makes me happy. Onto Isleworth 8, spot the archaeology. Where is it? There it is, yes another boat, hooray. This is the third year we've worked on this vessel, it sits hidden behind a dry duck at BJ Woods boatyard on Isleworth 8 and this year we focused on the starboard side. It's also the muddiest site we do, it has leeches, it's a great site. We worked on recording the starboard side of it, we'll probably do another season there next year and we should have it finished then. But this vessel, we had Anthony Firth, Dr Anthony Firth, who first alerted us to the possibility that this vessel was there, came down along with a colleague from the Royal Naval Museum down in Portsmouth and this vessel's got quite an interesting history. It's one of, there were 550 of these built, they were emergency World War I submarine chasers ordered by the Admiralty in a mad panic in 1915-1916 because they didn't know when the Germans started using U-boats to sink all our ships. They had a mad panic and ordered over 500 of these things. This one after the war was converted into a houseboat, she was called Cordon Rouge, she was then renamed Eothan and in the Second World War was one of the little ships at Dunkirk before again becoming a houseboat and finally being abandoned in the 1980s. This is not our vessel, this is ML285, our one is ML286, there are no known photos of this vessel surviving but that's what she would have looked like in the First World War when she was built. Of the 550 that we know were built, we think this is possibly the only one left in existence so it's well worth recording. On to Putney, we were going to work at Putney this year predominantly because we picked up in monitoring last year, we noticed a couple of new posts right down at the water's edge, just over there somewhere. However this year we didn't see them, whether the tide didn't get low enough or possibly they'd been washed away or eroded out, they weren't there. So we continued to work, we'd started recording this thing over the years, this is what Nat likes to call the long hard thing. For a while this kind of puzzled us really as to what it was. It's a lot of reused masonry and it stretches out along in front of the river wall, the sort of current thought is it's actually to protect the base of the river wall, there's a big bulge in it and we think it's to stop it coming out. So anyway we worked on that for a few days and Pamela Greenwood, who some of you may know, she tends to work a little bit downstream of our site and she said oh you've got to come and see something and she said I don't want to take this out but you lot can and it was this, a bit of human skull, two bits of human skull. As yet we haven't done any work on the skull, it is at Mola awaiting being looked at but the deposits it's coming out of are prehistoric so we thought we'd get a bit of prehistory, we didn't get the bit we thought we were going to get, we got that instead. So again it'd be interesting to see what comes up on the tideway side which is just upstream of our site. We also had an open day as part of London History Day which Josh may talk about later, excellent. On to Cannon Street, again one of our favourite sites and we were looking at this area just by Cousin Lane stairs because as you'll see from a later picture the erosion here is quite spectacular and again this is an area which is probably going to get the Greenwich Tower of London rock armouring treatment. So we recorded the base of the River Stour, at least two phases, possibly three, the earliest one possibly around the time of Cannon Street being built in the 1860s, Cannon Street station, possibly earlier. Elements of an earlier course on a different alignment, we've reused timbers from buildings and definitely a different alignment as you'll see here. So that's the current edge of the latest large bed revetment, those are our earlier causeway timbers. So we also recorded the 19th century revetment but as well as that there were also earlier posts probably of oak running out in front, so an earlier revetment, possibly late 18th century, possibly early 19th century and quite possibly contemporaneous with this causeway, this earlier causeway and again this is just to give you an idea of the the level of erosion that is happening. Once these large bed revetments start to fail the Thames just scours in and just rips, rips the back out of them. Deptford, we did a couple of those down at another shipbuilding site, this is Deptford Royal Dockyard and we recorded another slipway, this is a new one that has only popped out in say the last year and a half, 18 months maybe, very different to the one we worked on about four years ago. This one had a lot of reused ship's timbers in its build from broken up vessels and very late vessels, they were similar to the Charlton vessels, so posts of 1815. So this one, this slip was probably at the very last gas for Deptford Royal Dockyard, 1850s, 1860s. The one we looked at this year, totally different construction, no reused ship's timbers, sort of semi-formed timber, so reject timbers if you like, they've made it to the Royal Dockyard, they're starting to form them to go into a ship and someone goes no that's not good enough, we're not using that for a ship, we're going to use it as part of a slipway. So I think this is probably earlier than the other one, again hopefully we will see more of it as the years progress. Also it's covered over by a chalk barge bed. We get a lot of chalk barge beds and chalk is very difficult to date, but what we're finding is that it seems to be a very 19th century kind of thing, where we've got stratigraphy that makes sense, it seems to sit over 18th, early 19th century deposits and I suspect this is a barge bed probably for the dockyard's later use as a massive slaughterhouse of cattle. I suspect the barges, the carcasses have been put in barges which sit on that chalk, the cattle themselves come in alive probably along this very large causeway which is slightly downstream of the building slips. Also at Deptford we noticed that the pontoon attached to the big jetty had collapsed, so we don't go up that end of the foreshore anymore, especially not at high tide. We've ended a couple of days at Charlton, another ship breaking site where we've got the timbers of the Duke of Wellington, the largest warship in the world, had a launch in 1852 and this stack of timbers which has been turned into a wharf structure is slowly falling apart so we started working on this back in 2009 and we go back every couple of years. As more of the timbers fall off we can record the bits we didn't see before and there we are recording nice bits of ship. Also the river wall and this again is where CH2M come in, the river wall at Charlton was in a very very bad state and we noticed this year that there's a nice brand new river wall there. River defences are really important, a lot of London, particularly South London, is below the high tide now. We also noted just upstream at the Corry's barge works that the new ladder had come in. It's not a very good safety ladder though however because you can't actually get up it so it's nice and yellow, it's not actually any use. There we go. We then went to Brentford, we're now into August now as we whizzed through and we looked at a couple of vessels hidden behind a very large barge. There's a small, possibly a ship's boat, clinker built, very similar to the sort of thing we have at Custom House for those of you who've been there and it's sitting on a much larger vessel, carvel built, so planks putted end to end, concrete repair stroke ballast in the middle and this is a much more substantial vessel. One of the people who live on the boats at Brentford, it's a sort of squatted mooring, was suggesting that this could be, or the rumour was that this was a World War II American torpedo boat. It isn't, construction's wrong. The American PT boats, like British fast naval craft at the time, were double diagonal planked. This is not, this is carvel built. So it could have been big enough, it's that kind of size maybe, 90 foot long maybe, but probably more likely to be a pleasure craft, a domestic, you know, sort of commercial craft on the river. Finally at Rotherhithe, again one of our very, very fast eroding sites. This is just down below the Mayflower pub, just immediately downstream of the Mayflower and this is a series of 1820s, at least two revetments, slowly eroding out and we're getting more and more stuff coming out. We've got more and more rudders coming out this year, more windlasses coming out as well and some weird things as well. This structure here, or this bit of timber, started to look like a rudder. As we clean more and more of it, it isn't. It's a series of reused nautical timbers which don't really work like that on a ship. I think they've been bolted together subsequently after they've been broken and a whole, this is very peculiar, these little bits here in a line, just tiny bits of reused nautical timber, don't understand it at all. A bit of rudder there. It's clearly something, some sort of barge bed, presumably it's for vessels to sit on, but we don't quite understand why do you only get those there? Why don't you get them all the way through? Again, we will hopefully see more in the future and yet again, we've got an early 19th century structure which is then replaced by a chalk barge bed. Barge beds, for a long time, we didn't really understand them. It's just more and more work, the more we do, the more it starts to make sense. Finally, we also noted, and again to bring CH2M back in, the erosion of the river wall here was spectacular. This isn't even foundations. This pottery waste here is part of the foreshore surface and when we first started going, the foreshore surface was coming out here and it was all this pottery waste. That's the foundations, so it gives you an idea when this is built in the probably 19th century, foreshore surface is something like up here and this is the actual foreshore that they've built the foundations on eroding out. We sent, so this was in the end of August, last week of August, we sent a photo, this photo in fact, to CH2M and said this is quite serious. When we went back and did a guided walk there about a month ago, they'd already started repairing the river wall or putting temporary remedial works. So, I think the point to reiterate here is all your work on the foreshore is not just helping preserve the archaeology by record but it's also preserving London's flood defences. Going down there gives us a real handle on what's happening to London's river defences and we can communicate directly with the people who can do something about it. So, you are doubly good. I think I'll leave it there. Well done.