The Water Tower

A developer has asked AA's help with a water tower; he wants to de#olish it to #ake way for his building project.  The local council used to own it, it was listed, but parts of it were de#olished and then it was de-listed.  It is now rather a#biguous.  What is left of the building was #ostly built in about 1881 - though there is an older section dating to the 1840s.  The building is in grand water works Ro#anesque style.  It is a beauty - but no one can find a use for it as it is.  It stands in a Conservation Area.   It's a tricky business, AA has to report on it to the local authority - to help the developer get Planning Per#ission to de#olish it.  Unfortunately, for the developer, if he gets per#ission to de#olish it he will probably have to pay AA a largeish lu#p of £££ to record it. 

In an ideal world all #agnificent architecture would be kept, used and loved, but we don't live in that world.  The developer wants us to be his friend, but we have to report on the building in an unbiased way - if we don't, our evidence is co#pro#ised.  This is a situation we have encountered several ti#es - developers are si#ply not aware of the potential costs involved in getting Listed Building Consent or Planning Per#ission - and when they find out, they can feel they have been stitched up by an unholy alliance of the archaeologist and the conservation officer.   It just isn't true! 

Not sure what we can do to get over this #essage - Historic Building Recording is often an essential part of getting planning per#ission for a listed property - it needs to be budgeted for.  The level of recording required can vary fro# a few photos and a description, to a co#plete survey, detailed drawings and photographs and a great deal of historic research (which #eans hours or days in the local record office.)   Either way, it isn't up to the archaeologist to decide - that's what the conservation officer decrees.  We are only obeying orders!  We have little influence on the situation.

Bermondsey Abbey

The Bermondsey Abbey research continues.  It's a strange thing, but Mark worked on it years ago when he was at the Museum of London.  In the last few years the MoL publication about Bermondsey Abbey has finally come out.  Now a new(ish) phase of excavation (I think it was completed several years ago), carried out by Pre-Construct Archaeology needs to be looked at.  The developer has come up with money for a decent amount of post-excavation work, and Mark has been looking at the stones.  In fact he can be seen looking at them in a picture in an earlier posting.

Bermondsey Abbey was a vast foundation, and took up a very significant stretch of the area.   Whenever we sat at the traffic lights on Tower Bridge Road, Mark would mention that we were crossing the nave of the abbey.  Grange Road at that junction was of course a reference to the Abbey's storehouses. 

Tower Bridge Road has been completely changed - a lot of the recent buildings have been destroyed in turn - including our old branch of Lloyds Bank.  It isn't any easier to image what lies beneath the new buildings.

Part of Mark's work with the stones is about trying to re-create an idea of what did lie beneath.  The basic thing to do with old architectural stones is to record them, photograph them, note any peculiarities, make a recording of the type of moulding, the tools used, estimate the date, assess what architectural feature it may have been part of.  That's the first stage.  At the second stage - funding permitting - one can group the fragments together according to what feature they belonged to, then it's usually possible to reconstruct that feature, even where only a few fragments remain.

Reconstruction is based on a number of things - certain geometrical relationships, similar features in other buildings, occasionally there are drawings of the building when the feature was still in situ, and occasionally, when you have 90-something percent of the information, a tiny bit of guesswork might be needed to finish it off.

Detailed drawings of the pieces go on a CAD program and then there's a lot of fiddling around - and eventually, a drawing of the reconstruction is created.  Using this information, plus measurements of the foundation, intervals between pillars etc., one can usually come up with a drawing of the whole building. Often one can be pretty certain of its accuracy, but even a less secure drawing is still an enormous help to someone who wants to understand what a site once looked like.  Features such as roofs usually have to be extrapolated from other existing medieval buildings as there is seldom much archaeological evidence surviving today.

It's a shame developers, particularly in big cities like London, can't put up information boards where they've built over some interesting site, to give passers-by some idea of what was once there.  It would give the developers a bit of publicity, and add glory to their brand!   And provide work for archaeological specialists of course...

Who pays for archaeology? The owner!

A man at a networking breakfast asked me this this morning - the average viewer of Time Team doesn't always ask this question, but it's a matter of keen interest to archaeologists, especially freelance ones.

I explained that it depended on the job: in extreme cases some of it was publicly funded, through large public bodies like English Heritage, that there was charitable funding - indirectly through the Heritage Lottery fund - which can be used for certain special projects, such as recording the worked stone collection at Torre Abbey which Mark was working on last year.  Thanks to statutory requirements (PPS5), developers have to pay for archaeology - where it is likely to be found. Before the statutory requirements, there was rather less archaeology! 

Not all developers are giant publicly quoted companies dealing with huge sites where a great deal of archaeology may be discovered.  A lot of the "developers" are individuals who own listed properties - and they often find it surprising that they are expected to pay an archaeologist to record their property before they insert a new bathroom, extend their kitchen or put a swimming pool "within the curtilage" of their listed property. 

I have some sympathy for owners of listed properties: I was brought up in one - pre-refurbishment, and a very glorious chilly heritage experience it was too.  My father - something of a dinosaur perhaps - had a rather mixed view of his duties as the owner as part of Britain's heritage.  He felt firstly that it was his house - and no one could tell him what to do with it.  An understandable view but when it was pointed out that he was the guardian of a valuable bit of heritage (a farmhouse, cut down from a manor house - a royal manor in the 14thC) he then began to wonder why the Government weren't paying him to look after it, and keep it up.  Dream on!

Not surprisingly perhaps, he had a less than compliant view of planning permission, preferring to acquire it retrospectively - sharp intakes of breath all round! I think the only archaeologist who ever saw the house was Mark - on social visits.   No doubt all over the country bits of sneaky refurbishment are taking place - without records being made of the changes being made.  Some of these things seem small and insignificant to house owners - what does it matter?  But there is much to learn about building techniques and styles, especially specific local techniques - which can be of use where people want to conserve their property authentically.  There are things that seem meaningless now - which may in future provide good evidence for something we haven't even considered today. 

Attitudes change - lathe and plaster used to be thought awfully primitive - until its insulating properties were recognised and appreciated.   The reason my parents' house was so cold was because some revolutionary had stripped off the lathe and plaster and improved it with brick - a wall one brick thick is rather less snug than lathe and plaster - so that's a technology well worth considering as the energy prices rise.

Selborne Priory - providing information

The work on Cambridge is finished - well, this stage of it.  And the next job in hand is continuing the analysis of the stones at Selborne Priory in Hampshire.

Selborne is more famous perhaps as the site of Gilbert White's A Natural History of Selborne, a much loved 19thC natural history book.   He was the rector of Selborne, a village in Hampshire, where the Priory was founded, about a mile from the village, in 1233.   It was an Augustinian Priory and rather unusually, was dissolved in the 15thC, somewhat before the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16thC,.  This was because the land was "appropriated" (with papal approval) in 1484 by Magdalen College Oxford. 

Mark started this work some months ago when he visited the stones, which are kept at the Hampshire Museum to record them.  They were originally excavated from 1953 onwards and some records have been made.  However, the paper records of the mid 20thC, while very useful, are easier to search when they are in digital form.   As well as making drawings and taking photographs, Mark will create a digital archive, which can be searched in different ways, and which can be used to analyse the assemblage, by date or petrology or architectural feature, or style.  are finally being pieced together. 

The assemblage of stones is largely contemporary:  Selborne Priory was an Augustinian foundation, established in 1233 and the stones nearly all date from that period.  When the priory was excavated there were very few finds apart from the stones, many of which are highly fragmentary, the stones therefore have a very considerable importance in understanding the buildings and how they were used.  Currently Mark is making detailed drawings for a future publication of the Priory.   The work is being funded by a long-established archaeological society, which has the funds to carry out this sort of  work occasionally. 

All over the country there are assemblages of stones like this - which could, if the funding and the will were there, be published and form the basis of reconstruction drawings of the original buildings, which would help visitors understand the archaeological sites when they visit them.

The OS survey map is covered with marks indicating "tumulus" or "Motte" or "battle" or "Priory (site of)".  It would be wonderful if when one walked there to visit them there was an information board funded through English Heritage with Heritage Lottery Funding just to tell people what had been there once and what it might have looked like.  

Last week when visiting my father I saw the humps in the ground that we were always told was a "Mercian castle".  It was clearly some sort of defensive earthwork.  I realised how little I knew about Saxon defensive structures compared with post-Norman castles.   This earthwork is right next door to the local Asda.   It would be fantastic if Asda or the developers had taken on the task of getting the necessary information from the right person and providing an information board of some kind.   It was probably a really busy earthwork too - it's set just on the edge of the Thames floodplain, where the border with Wessex? would have been, a long way from the Mercian heartland and out on a limb.   One could never have imagined it would one day be stuck in a housing estate next to a supermarket.

Cambridge - local or national?

We do quite a bit of work for Cambridge, mostly for the University Archaeology Unit.   Recently Mark has been there to look at some architectural fragments, and is writing a report on them.  Some of them are from the college that was the precursor to Trinity (Michaelhouse) - curious, one thinks of it as ancient enough not to have a precursor.

Meanwhile our other Cambridge-based client, Cambridge Council Archaeology Unit, has been swallowed up by Oxford Archaeology - it has a new identity as Oxford Archaeology East (presumably Cambridge Archaeology Oxford or Oxford Archaeology: Cambridge would be too much of a mouthful and create a vague impression of the ancient antagonism).  The great march forward of the big archaeology units like Oxford and Wessex has mixed benefits.  Presumably it provides stable employment for some good archaeologists, but one of the downsides, which we've seen locally, is that the big units are often unfamiliar with the terrain and history of the area and don't realise some of the implications of the finds.   For example there is a particular type of Anglo-Saxon burial that is really quite common in Thanet, but seldom found elsewhere - so when a large unit find one while working down here they create a great song and dance about it.... while local archaeologists look on bemused and point out that 14 of them have been found already.

It's interesting really - because archaeology isn't the same everywhere and they really should write into the planning conditions a clause that requires a local archaeologist to be involved on big excavations, to ensure the contexts are better understood.  I'd love to think that all the archaeologists who work here read Ges Moody's The Archaeology of Thanet before getting stuck in - but actually, I'd rather they took on Thanet Archaeology as a consultant every time they dig up a road. 

There seems to be a thought that archaeology - like teaching, or accountancy, or management is a transferable skill that can be used identically, anywhere in the country.   I would be the last person to encourage a parochial outlook - but there is parochial expertise which needs to be used in archaeology, otherwise vital knowledge can be missed or lost.

This starts an interesting dialogue between the value of the parochial aspect of archaeology and the need for archaeologists to see things as part of a national picture. Architectural Archaeology tries to have a national view of its areas of specialisation while making use of local studies and research by more locally based archaeologists.   Similarly, it is hoped that specialist work carried out in Cambridge, will be of use to local historians and archaeologists in creating their bigger picture of the town's development.

What's so architectural about this archaeology? Stones we have loved....

There is a lot of toing and froing about this issue - are they "worked stones" or are they "architectural fragments"? 

This is a typical moulding which has been carved out of butter, so it is neither, but it gives you an interesting idea of a way to spend a dull breakfast. Butter takes a better chamfer than most spreads.

Perhaps this picture will help?

Here is the distinguished archaeologist, and a large collection of - well, are they worked stones or architectural fragments?  You decide.

Over the generations, people have built and demolished, and used the old stones in a variety of ingenious ways: a quoin from an Irish tower house used in a pigsty.  Another towerhouse stone used to prop open a field gate on an Irish farm.   Roman building materials stud the towers of churches, and church stone work is re-used in farms on outhouses. A tiny moulded lancet window is inserted in a dairy wall.  The bishop's wife rather fancies some of those "pretty stones" for her rockery in the Close.  The foundations are re-used, and a new building arises on the basis of the old.   Leadenhall Market for example, built on the basis of a medieval garner, or communal grain store.

A lot of stones are just bunged into a hole and used in foundations, or as infill or hardcore.   Until the buildings they are supporting are demolished in turn and they are found, seen to be beautiful, interesting, to have a value in what they can tell us about a past building.   They can be studied in a variety of ways, which will be the subject of another post.

This is Architectural Archaeology - Standing structures

We like to think the business name "does what it says on the headed paper" but it isn't always clear to people what we can do.

Archaeology related to architecture,. so we don't do bones, treasure, skeletons, Egyptian mummies, or all the exciting stuff people want to read about.  If we come across any of these in the course of our work, we call in the experts.

Buildings through the ages?

Yes - although we don't have much to do with post holes and hearths and pre-historic dwellings. And there isn't usually enough of any Roman or Anglo-Saxon building standing to call us in.   AA deals with standing structures and so we tend to get started in the middle ages: churches, abbeys, castles, cottages, farm buildings, priories and friaries, Irish tower houses, or tower houses anywhere (if you want to hire us in Italy).

After the middle ages/early modern period, there's a bit more variety, we've dealt with Georgian farmhouses and townhouses, Victorian factories, granaries, barns of all periods, a Georgian icehouse, a boathouse, an oasthouse, a lime kiln - whatever, whether domestic, commercial or industrial.  If it needs an archaeological report for planning permission we can supply it.


Dr Mark Samuel is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and has an Institute of Field Archaeology specialism in "Standing Structure Recording".  He is currently recording the large Victorian Buckland mill in Dover, which are being converted to housing by Gillcrest Group, ably assisted by site assistant Ned Samuel (during the school holidays), and with administrative backup from Kate Hamlyn.  It's a small family business - rather medieval really.

We will be putting up pictures shortly!