Summer Escapes: The River's Edge with Elliott Wragg

I've worked for the Thames Discovery Programme for more than 10 years and what I'm going to talk about tonight is broadly a sort of history of the archaeology of the Thames and the second part of the talk will be about the sort of highlight, the highlights of things that we found when I was working there. So let's go. So the first evidence of people realising that old stuff in the Thames goes back to the 17th century when Samuel Pepys whilst looking at an excavation for a dry dock in Blackpool describes finding perfect trees over covered with earth, nut trees with the branches and the very nuts upon them, their shells black with age and their kernel upon opening decayed but their shell perfectly hard as ever. And what we think he's looking at is something like the photo here which is a prehistoric submerged forest found at Ereth in East London. So this is when what is now the intertidal zone was dry land when sea levels and river levels were much lower. While Pepys was seeing what he didn't realise was Thames archaeology and going probably into the medieval period, the mudlocks who were generally very poor people would be out on the foreshore basically scavenging and in 1861 Henry Mayhew, a social observer writing about London's poor, talks about old, some old men but old women and young children predominantly going down onto the foreshore and basically scavenging for anything they can. Bits of coal, bits of rope, bits of copper, anything that they can scavenge. So it's real subsistence kind of scavenging type economy stuff for them there. And of course mudlarking goes on to this day but it's slightly different now. It's not people who are finding bits of coal to sell, it's people who are looking for artefacts. And there are a couple of two, well there are two very good societies, Society of Thames Mudlarks and Thames and Field who do most of the work on the Thames foreshore. And if you're interested in artefacts from the Thames I recommend you go and have a look at their websites. They've got an awful lot of very nice stuff they found there. Our focus is predominantly however less on things and more on the archaeology and the features. So the mudlarkers were going along in the 1860s as Mayhew wrote but at the same time we start to get the rise in antiquarians and a lot of the, if not the vast majority, of the finds that come out of the Thames belong to this period where antiquarians would pay navvies or workers who are working on building bridges, embankments and sewers in the Thames and they would pay them to bring them interesting looking old things. And the vast majority as I say of the really good artefacts that come out of the Thames belong to this period. So on the left hand side of this slide we have Viking era axes and spearheads. On the right a whole series of prehistoric metal and wooden finds particularly from the Bronze and Iron Age. Spearheads, swords, axe heads in the fishing implements in the top left. At the bottom left that is the wooden Dagenham idol and in the middle is the Battersea shield which is an Iron Age, extraordinary Iron Age ceremonial shield that's in the British Museum. One of the problems with a lot of these finds of this era, the antiquarian finds, is their provenance. In particular one antiquarian was quite obsessed with the idea that Caesar crossed the Thames of Brentford and fought a battle there so he would pay a premium on things from Brentford. So strange enough loads of things apparently came from Brentford but there you go. Again in the Museum of London's prehistoric galleries the vast majority of the finds there are out of the river which is why they've put a blue background on it. Similar kind of range of things, spearheads, swords, lovely polished stone axe there and also a number of skulls. We've had an awful lot of human remains out of the Thames over the years and particularly from the prehistoric period. But not only were the antiquarians getting real McCoy archaeology, a couple of chaps, Billy Smith and Charlie Eaton in the 1860s, they started off as mudlarks and realised it was much easier just to forge their own old things. So this is one of their efforts, this is a medallion purporting to be from 1030 so around the time of King Cnut with a crowned head to the left and a knight's helmet on the right. And in the end they were found out but it was very embarrassing for a lot of people in museums who were taken in. And of course now their artefacts are known as Billy and Charlie's and they are collectibles in their own right now of course. The first real archaeology associated with the Thames comes in 1910 when they were digging the foundations for what would become the London County Council Hall and they found a Roman boat. And so it was excavated by the London Museum director Guy Laking, that's him in the bowler hat, here he is again. And so he excavated it and he drew it in triumphal horse procession to the London Museum where he undertook, along with a supposed conservator, a rather sort of strange idea of conserving using glycerin and plaster covered with tar. And he created a very nice display where the ship was displayed in a fanciful seascape of sand and pebbles and a complete stuffed seagull for full effect. And you can see here this is King George V and Queen Mary visiting the seagull and the Roman ship in 1912. So there's an awful lot of publicity about this and it was all very top end if you like the people who were coming to see. But Guy Laking, the director, he'd got really annoyed with it all by this point. And it's very rare I put on a slide just with words but this is a statement of Guy Laking in 1912 and I think it deserves to stand alone. I do not know who else could have insisted me to fake it in the manner I directed. We have now finished with the Roman boat. Another is not likely to be found. We will take good care of that. This echoes the sentiments of all the officials of the London County Council who have been bothered with this white elephant. It's quite extraordinary you couldn't imagine a director of a museum saying anything like this today. And what is interesting actually bear in mind this is 1912. The next nautical remains found in London of any significance were almost 50 years later. So you wonder quite how much Laking's injunction to not find another Roman boat were taken. Into the 1930s this actually is real Brentford, not pretend Brentford. Mortimer Wheeler did a little bit of work on the Thames foreshore and he identified this. He suggested this might be the floor of a Roman hut. We now think more likely it was part of a wattle hurdle, as part of river bank defences or possibly as part of a Saxon fish trap and there'll be more on Saxon fish traps later. But the first person to really start to look at the archaeology of the river systematically wasn't an archaeologist at all initially. He was a failed playwright called Ivan Noel Hume and he started to really try and see it as an archaeological site rather than just a place where you can just find things. And he talked in his book Treasures in the Thames of 1954. He said the river cries out not for private collectors but for local museums who can patrol their own shores and so preserve for the nation the treasure that still lies there. And if you replace the word volunteers, sorry the word museums with volunteers that's what we've been trying to do with the Thames Discovery Programme. This is an example of Ivan Noel Hume's work. This is in central London on the south bank just upstream of London Bridge and he's done what we would now call a walkover survey and he's plotted where he's finding the various artefacts. So we've got in the middle Roman medieval pottery to the left by Cannon Street Bridge we've got Roman pavement to the east. We've got river of moving mud. Noel Hume of course is the first person to discover the presence of sea monsters in the Thames. Noel Hume actually left Britain in I think the late 50s and became an archaeologist in America with a lot of colonial era stuff in America and I think he ended up as the curator of the Colonial Williamsburg Museum I believe so. So there's a good connection there. Into the 70s again Noel Hume goes off to America and things kind of die down and then in the 70s things really start to pick up both in archaeology generally in the UK and also the archaeology of the Thames. In west London this is at Putney. I don't know if any of you know Putney. It's where the boat race ends, the university boat race. But here we have volunteers from Wandsworth Historical Society and the West London Archaeology Group and they are recording prehistoric peat deposits. So this is when sea levels and river levels were lower. It was dry land. There was vegetation. As the river encroaches it starts to rot and it rots down and forms peats and most of the peats on the Thames we have dates of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age and they started recording these and picking up prehistoric artefacts out of them in the early 70s. At the same time in the City of London this is the sort of glory days of rescue archaeology where people would strip off their clothes and get in front of bulldozers and not all their clothes as you can see just most of them and would go in to try and excavate the sites before the developers came in. And this is Bainard's Castle here in the west of the city. Again lots of health and safety back in those days. But what we're seeing here is a succession of river front revetments. So the actual current river is to sort of the bottom left of the picture and inland is to the top right. And what this demonstrates is that London over hundreds of years essentially encroaches into the river over time and effectively canalises the river which is why we have such a high tidal range in central London is because the river has been forced into a much smaller space than it was originally intended for. So what we've got here is a succession of medieval waterfronts going into the river. And by the sort of end of the 1990s you can see on this map here a lot of the sites had been dug, the waterfront site. And in fact nowadays if we had a modern map of this they would all be dug. And in fact for example number 14 to the right which is the old custom house only two years ago archaeologists went back there and because the building that was built when this was dug in the 70s had now come down they re-excavated the bits they hadn't quite got there the first time. So now pretty much the whole central waterfront behind the river wall has now been excavated in London, central London. On the river again despite what Guy Laking said Peter Marsden came around in the end of the 50s and through the 60s and early 70s and found an awful lot of nautical remains particularly in the area of Blackfriars Bridge and a number of ancient vessels were found there. This is the Roman Blackfriars ship that he found there. Onto the foreshore itself this is a Bermondsey, Chambers Wharf Bermondsey which is just downstream off Tower Bridge you can see in the background. And again this wasn't an archaeologist who worked on this site this was a photography student called Richard Hill from University College London. And people were starting to get more of a handle on what the foreshore was and how foreshore archaeology worked. Almost to this day there's a perception that things are washed up onto the onto the foreshore. In actual fact there are layers of archaeology. What Richard Hill was able to demonstrate here was you had the prehistoric peat deposits you then had overlying them riverine silt and sand deposits which had been deposited by the river on top of the peat and then on top of those riverine deposits you had man-made consolidation deposits. What you've got to realise is that this area this is the Port of London the heart of the Port of London and it would be absolutely filled with shipping and the foreshore would be filled with people loading and unloading those vessels. Now if you're trying to load and unload big barrels or bales of hay or whatever and your surface is prehistoric peats and riverine silts you're going to sink it's going to turn into a quagmire. So over hundreds of years in central London people are dumping stuff on the foreshore to create surfaces to make it a working platform that they can load and unload shipping. So what we actually have on the foreshore it isn't like a desert island beach it's a whole series of initially natural horizons overlaid by a series of man-made consolidation deposits and the top of it here you can just see these lines they are actually 18th century warship timbers which have been repurposed in what we call a gridiron which is something your vessels can sit on at low tide so you can do work on them. About the same time as Richard Hill was working in Bermondsey further upstream at Vauxhall this structure was found. I don't know if you can just pick out the upright timber piles there's a sort of line along the left going out to the river and a line along the right going out to the river and we think this was probably a jetty or possibly a bridge to an island that's been lost and this dates to the bronze age about 1500 BC and at the top there you can see a bronze age spearhead again dating to this period there were two of those down here and interestingly they weren't found lying on the side so it wasn't someone had just dropped a spear it was found point first down into the ground so it'd been either thrust into the ground or thrown and landed into the ground it was a deliberate deposition and as with most of those earlier prehistoric high status items found from the Thames we think there's an element of ritual deposition going on here much as you would throw coins into a wishing well. As a result of this in the all this information suddenly coming together in the sort of late 80s early 90s Gustav Mill who's in the centre at the top there and Nick Merriman and Mike Webber at the bottom they set up a thing called the Thames Archaeological Survey a joint venture between UCL, English Heritage and the Museum of London again using students and volunteers to try and do what Ivan Alchin did but bring it up to date and do it over a much wider area you know look at the whole of Greater London and see what kind of a resource we had there and they found astonishing things. In the bottom left here they found remains of small craft rowing boats above it you'll see the orange thing that is a Roman intaglio brooch and in the form of a Roman ship and that actually came to form our logo so you'll see that again. Top right ship rudders which were found at Shadwell bottom right that is a Saxon fish trap found at Chelsea and again in the middle that is a Neolithic club or beater wooden implement again found at Chelsea and other things they started mapping river stairs like these on the left found at Strand on the Green in the west of London and things like causeways which are designed that you can go down and access a boat without getting all muddy at any stage of the tide so at low tide or high tide you can always get to your So this was the first baseline study of the whole of the resorts in Greater London where they made a whole series of records which basically was what we built on as we moved on. Again there's a little hiatus between the TAS and until we started going in 2008 and there's a few bits of work including odd university work down there. There was also a Time Team I don't know how familiar you are in America with Time Team it's a British TV program that focuses upon archaeology. Becky's nodding so that's good and they came to have a look at the Bronze Age structure of Moxhall and excavated one of the piles and I particularly like this picture because it shows when the TV are involved just how many people it takes to dig a hole which is about a foot and a half wide. There's lots of commercial work also done by people such as Museum of London Archaeology at various stages in advance of development work such as putting in new bridges and then we came along in 2008 Gustav Milne again and Natalie Cohen set us up originally as part of UCL and the Museum of London and we were then taken over in 2011 by Museum of London Archaeology. So the next sort of section of this is just looking at a few of the highlights of if you like the last 10-13 years of Thames archaeology. This is our site it's the longest site in London actually it's the longest two sites in London with one on each bank and we'll start off oh yes right if you want to find more about Thames Discovery program have a look at our website google Thames Discovery you'll find it. In particular there are literally thousands I think of photos on the Flickr stream so all sorts of all the way along the river there are photos of just about everything we've found. There's also a page on there called the Riverpedia page where we try to link articles about Thames Archaeology not just our own but ones that the volunteers have done and other ones of interest so that might be worth looking at as well. So on to the archaeology and this is Vauxhall those of you like James Bond films will recognise the MI6 building there and this site in some respects this demonstrates the element of fortune involved in finding archaeology on the foreshore. The earlier bronze age structure is about 300-400 meters to the right of this picture this picture's taken from Vauxhall bridge the bronze age stuff is about 400 meters upstream and we were there one day waiting for it to come out and you do a lot of waiting for the tithe in foreshore archaeology some days it just doesn't play the river but so we're waiting and it was a horrible day it was the middle of winter absolutely hammering down with rain and we just went do you know what let's go and with the access is just downstream of the MI6 building so as luck would have it as we were just about to come off the foreshore in front of this building we noticed a number of posts sticking up right at the bottom of the low tide mark where the little figures are so we took some samples sent them off for radiocarbon dating got them back and went oh went back down again took some more samples sent them off same results came back and they came back at four and a half thousand bc which is by far the oldest structure in central london it's at the end towards the end of the mesolithic period there's a couple of the posts there we don't know quite what they are they're right at the low tide mark so you hardly ever see them and hopefully over time more may erode out but associated with them you can see in the two so the landscape pictures the top right in particular you can see a very dark brown gray peat layer which is overlaid by these silty sandy green alluvial river horizons so the bottom the dark stuff is the peat this is busted vegetation overlaid by riverine deposits and if you look in the bottom left looking down on the top of those riverine deposits there's loads and loads and loads of burnt flint which is always really a dead giveaway for prehistoric activity they burn the flint to heat water and there's loads of it down all there was and along with that we found a load of lithics some very nice bits of flint tool we found antler tools a couple of antler picks and we found an awful lot of pottery this is on the right here this is extremely early neolithic pottery about 3900 bc so that whole area in voxel that's the three four hundred meter stretch there's clearly something going on there's big gaps between the bronze age and the neolithic in the mesolithic there's also evidence of iron but for some reason or other people people keep coming back to that spot in the prehistoric period probably to make james bond films uh sacks and fish traps i said we'd get back onto this you can't see a lot here that's our one at the bottom right is the one at chelsea the one on the left is actually a series of parallel posts you can see them there stretching out there they're forming a double post line that would have a wattle hurdle between them the one on the right is actually huge and you can just about report arrows where it stretches if you look closely you might be able to see them and that one runs for about 40 meters that's about hammersmith and we've now uh recorded more than 15 sacks and fish traps they date the earliest ones are from the late roman period we know the saxons are in london before the romans leaving around 400 when roman london collapses a little bit later and they go right through into the 10th century this gives you an idea of what a y-shaped fish trap would look like effectively the fish swim into it at high tide and then at low tide you come and just empty your fish baskets very efficient way for fishing the linear ones what we call barrier traps we think are probably uh were connected to long lost islands have been an awful lot of landscaping and dredging on the town so in further upstream there are still quite a lot of islands in central london and there are very few onto the tower of london and this was the site of uh earliest fish traps uh dating again to the fourth century but what this illustrates here this photograph illustrates the erosion regime on the foreshore of the thames um we don't really dig we don't have to the river does the digging for us and and it's changed the whole regime of the river has changed recently because they've now got these very fast river buses and they create an awful amount of bosh and the turbulence just rips the foreshore apart so the photo to the left shows the cofferdam that was put in when they were building the tower bridge in the 1890s if you look at that photo you can see where the cofferdam has been cut off so that would have been foreshore height there or thereabouts in the 1890s this photo is taken in the 1990s a photo to the right if you look behind josephine there at the back there that's tab ridge that's our cofferdam it's exactly the same thing so on the you've got it in say 1999 and on the right you've got it in 2009 so we've lost in in 10 years we've lost three or four foot of foreshore there just as a result of these different vessels causing more wash whereas for 100 years we've lost about four inches in 10 years the next 10 years we lost about four foot so much so that you can see along the bottom of the river wall those are the 14th century foundations for the tower of london river wall and this extension of the tower out west sorry out east occurs in the 14th century and one of the things we found there as well again you can see the footings in the background was they are having an erosion problem here earlier as well you can see in the middle there are reused base plates from buildings they've been repurposed on the foreshore a whole series of uprights braces and what it looks like had happened was they'd had an awful lot of erosion in the later medieval and early post-medieval period as well this is right below the arsenal where the arsenal of the tower of london was so effectively this was where arms and armor were and shipped out to wherever they needed to supply soldiers or the navy and so this was obviously a very busy place and erosion had occurred a lot and so this is back down roughly at say the the foreshore level in the 16th 1600 or so and then they had to rebuild it up to the height of those posts just to keep the foreshore together we found something earlier than that as well we're pretty certain what we've got here is a remains of an elm jetty you can see four posts to the left that the guys are measuring and there were another four behind them you can just see three there difficulty with elm it's very hard to get a dendrochronological date on there isn't a perfect curve for elm and sometimes we have waterlogged deposits it's very hard to get a good carbon date on them sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't it's a bit tricky it's to do with elements in the water sort of confounding the issue what we could say with these elm timbers is they're on a different alignment to the 14th century river wall so it's most likely that they predated and so are probably more to do with whopping as was civilian whopping before they extended the tower precincts east or just possibly they may have been put in as a jetty to bring in the stones to create the extension to the tower either hard to tell really and just to give you a range of the sort of finds we found these in a top left there's a prehistoric flint scraper top in the middle that's a coin of nero top right is a very abraded a piece of saxo-norman pottery round about 1000 or so it's been kicking around on the foreshore quite a bit it's very abraded bottom left is a medieval beer token with a picture of a bishop on it possibly from a pub called the bishop who knows in the middle is a silver penny from the time of charles the first so about the time of our foreshore reconsolidation and the bottom right is a very nice probably early 19th century clay pipe bulb with a beehive on it and this probably came from a pub called beehive they used to sell them already filled with tobacco and you would basically smoke it and chuck it away but it was all a bit of branding for the pub as well onto Greenwich Palace a bit further out to the east and back in the days of the TAS they found a bit of a Tudor jetty there which is the sort of top right picture is not much of it there but we started to see in early 2009 so it's a very large timber stock to come out down at the bottom of the foreshore which are what these other pictures are the top right picture also shows that thing sticking out of the water that is a big anchor chain fixed into the ground and archaeologists are quite good at dating things like that particularly when they say port of london authority 1927 on them so being not entirely on the ball as sometimes i'm not we have these big very rectangular timbers right next to this thing which says 1927 so our initial thoughts were oh it's all to do with that it's fairly modern and over the next year or two more and more of this comes out the bottom left picture you can see the anchor chain is still in the water behind the person in the blue there but we've got this horseshoe type base plate structure coming out and over the next couple of years more and more of these timbers start coming out and what we ended up with is this it's not the best photo in the world but it's a massive timber jetty it's huge we don't know quite how far it goes into the water um um but what it turned out to be is this is a jetty probably dating to the mid 17th century to and it's not to do with the current greenwich palace it's to do with the uh previous one and it fits locationally with a panorama by chapel vanguard and documentary evidence by the volunteers suggest we're looking at the last repair to this in the 1630s as it goes right out into the river we had to adopt some rather interesting survey techniques involving sticking gus onto a bucket with a big long tape and he's about to get soaked by the wash from the passing river bus if you're wondering where i am i'm on the dry land holding the dry end of the tape let him go and get wet onto rubber hive again similar kind of area slightly upstream but we are coming forward in time now and this is predominantly an early 19th century site the top left picture shows the front of a barge bed revetment effectively a structure in the ground that you can play either timbers on top of in this case it's reused ships timbers and boat timbers or or you can put chalk in there the only evidence we have in london for using chalk in these barge beds is for 19th century but this one appears to come in in about 1820 and what's interesting about this one is unlike anything else in london foreshore structures you look at the bottom two slides it actually incorporates whale bone into the structure now the bottom letter you can actually see the nail sticking in through the nail it's through the whale bone it's been reused at least once before it's been put into this structure the bit on the right is part of a jaw bone and these are from the greenland right whale so-called because they're the right whale to hunt and we know that london whalers were operating in the late 18th early 19th century and this structure seems to have been dating to around the mid 1820s other things around there that have been reused the top right is a windlass which on a ship would be used to hoist the yards and the sails it's been repurposed here it's been sunk in the ground and turned into a feature that you can moor vessels to and we get a lot of windlasses reused as mooring with these bits of old vessel basically it would seem that it's the bits that you can't reuse in house building so things like keels windlasses they seem to be what we find most of on the foreshore and here we have examples of a keel two keels the bottom left and the right there the keels are very easy to identify they have this groove along the top both sides of the top it's called a rebate or a rabbet and it's where the whole clanking fits down into the top of the keel we also have in the top left picture a couple of stem posts which is effectively where the keel rises up at the front of the vessel we have here keels from four different vessels three of which were third rate two-decker warships of the line late 18th century and one sloop something something much smaller we did a lot of documentary research here and the structure had been clearly built to form a purpose it turns out this was a ship breaking yard so this was clearly it made a structure to make it easier for them to break up the ships so we were looking for a period in the documentary evidence when they broke up three third-rate ships of the line and a sloop and that narrowed down the hunt because they weren't they didn't break up that many ships and the the keel on the right really really sealed it in terms of identifying the vessels because you can see here sorry we were looking at admiralty records of so we knew what ships the admiralty had sold to the breakers to break up and so here you can see that the rebate stops just below the scale and then towards the far end you can see the rectangular mortises which is where the stern post would rise up that's the keel that's the stern post rudder hangs off the back so we got we knew those dimensions from where the hull rises up to hit the stern post and rudder and this piece of keel fitted precisely with the admiralty plans of the ship the danish ship called the danmark which was captured in 1807 we had another danish ship there the princess carolina captured at the same battle of copenhagen in 1807 we had the part of the dutch ship the prince frederick which was captured in 1798 and a british sloop the hornet which was actually built in rotherhithe in 1798 and broken up slightly less than 20 years later in rotherhithe as well these were all broken up around about 1817 so this is the end of the napoleonic wars and the admiralty are getting rid of their ships and it looks like they're getting rid of the ones they've captured which are probably in worse nick worse condition than the other ones also very rarely in rotherhithe they were put they were wedged in place some of them with these which are extremely rare on archaeological sites these are naval gun bag gun cheeks gun gun carriage cheeks i think you pardon you can see these are replicas here on hms victory if you see naval gun carriage carriages they're almost certainly replicas they really hardly survive they're small they're easily broken up for firewood and over the sort of 12 years 11 12 years i was working on this project we probably found 400 plus bits of ship and nautical timber and no one would take them no museum the conservation costs were too high the space the amount of space they take so all we could do is record them in situ but these uh gun carriage cheeks they are so rare we find we actually found homes for a couple of these so that was that was a very unusual result but at least at least they found good homes some of them burles wharf this is on the other side of the river to greenwich this is on the isle of dogs again this is illustrates a bit of the random nature of the foreshore and the the fact that it's eroding a mudlark was out and saw this staring up at him so he took the picture and rang the police as you should do when you find human remains and the police came down and he said do you think there's any more of it and they said no and they took the skull away and he sent us the picture and he said do you think there's any more of it and we said yes and the reason we said yes is because you can see it's still got a lot of teeth in in position it's also got the jaw is articulated that has not been kicking around on the foreshore rolling around that is in a grave cut so a team went out in the middle of winter it was right at the low tide mark and they managed to excavate almost all of the rest of the the skeleton i think they missed just a couple of toe bones and considering the conditions it's quite an extraordinary achievement the the skeleton is is of a juvenile the bones haven't been fused so we can't sex her here or him and dates to the mid to late 18th century it would seem which is quite unusual we have about two more post-medieval burials there's no evidence of trauma and there's no evidence particularly of disease that would kill them what we do think is it's probably a corpus burial and they slunk out at night couldn't afford a church burial and buried them on the foreshore another one very similar was found but very sad corpus corpus burial also at the isle of dogs was the slipways for brunel's great folly the great eastern huge quantum leaping concept for a ship absolute total failure in action and not to be approached in size for another 40 years when she was launched in 1858 sideways into the river so she didn't end up halfway up deptford high street on the other bank but those top left you can see the landing slips sorry the launch slips one of the launch slips from the great eastern charlton i'm aware we're running out of time here this was another shipwrecking site more nautical timbers much bigger than the brotherhide but not just nautical timbers the top left picture you can see what looked to be large lumps of concrete we covered weed they're not concrete they're massive lumps of iron and in a ship breaking yard context these presumably can only come from massive victorian armor plated battleships and indeed that's where it came from the ajax hms ajax of 1882 there at the bottom and the iron plates correlate in size to their deck armor and the massive lumps to the sort of massive 15 inch thick iron armor plate side she had and she was broken up there in 1905 it's the only ship of that sort only iron ship they they broke up they almost bankrupted the firm they used to bring breaking up wooden ships not metal ships i don't think their saws worked quite so well on it but the main large bits of timber came from the top left vessel hms duke of wellington on her launch in 1852 the largest warship in the world and there's a really good picture on the right this is looking through the duke of wellington as they're breaking her up behind her is a smaller vessel the edgar and to the right is another smaller vessel the hannibal and timbers from one or both of those were also there at charlton okay uh this is at isle of eight to finish up we're now well into the 20th century and this is uh was a basically a liverboard cruiser but it started off uh which was abandoned at the boatyard in the 1980s it started off as one of these the first world war motor launch and these were ordered in a panic by the admiralty in 1915 almost to the day the same day the lusitania came down and they weren't built in this country at all british shipyards were working flat out at the time um and the the admiralty were panicked by not knowing how to deal with u-boats so they sent a representative over to new york we talked to a chap called sutphen who ran the electric launch company of new york and they knocked out 550 of these in little over a year and they're incredibly cheap they kind of like flat pack things and because of american neutrality laws they had to assemble them in bits stick them on railway carriages send them up to canada and then they were finally fully assembled in canada but 550 of these served in the royal navy and we think our one up there is possibly the only survivor we've had rumors there's another one in malta but that's it so and our one at ml 286 not only fought in the first world war she was also at dunkirk she was one of the little ships bringing british troops off at dunkirk so there we are about 400 years of archaeological development on the foreshore but about six and a half thousand years of history and an american connection in there at the end now it's probably time for a bit of what you won't find on the foreshore but i thought i'd throw these in this is foreshore cakes made for our 10th anniversary conference which happened a few years ago uh but there we go it's it's a bit late for cake probably for me over here but probably about the right time for you so thank you very much