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...