Jessica was one of the senior supervisors on this site, one of a team of some 60 archaeologists. In the late 19th century the site, then containing small medieval buildings, was cleared and redeveloped when Queen Victoria Street was laid out. The Victorian buildings included deep basements which had led to truncation of earlier material. A lot of the Victorian buildings did not survive the Blitz in WWII, but the basements remained. In 1947 there was set up the Roman and Medieval Excavation Committee led by Professor W.F. Grimes. Ivor Noel Hume was amongst those who went round looking for potential archaeology in London. On this site in the 1950s, Bucklersbury House was to be built. Grimes visited the site and decided to put in some trenches before the redevelopment. He found the Temple of Mithras, first built in 240AD. It had had perhaps four phases of use. Originally dedicated to the Cult of Mithras, in the 4th century it was rededicated to Bacchus, and later fell into ruins. It had side aisles and a nave which was sunk lower than the aisles, representing the subterranean aspects of the Mithras cult, whose followers had originally met in caves. Most of the best finds from the temple are on display in the Roman Gallery at the Museum of London, but at the British Museum there is a large collection of objects just labelled “Walbrook” which may have come from the site. 1950s piling for the building of Bucklersbury House caused a large amount of material to be removed from the site; the archaeology had largely been truncated down to the 2nd century and before.

MoLA’s involvement started in 2004 with a desk-based assessment. In 2004-8 a series of test pits were dug to assess the level of survival, leading to a three-year excavation after Bucklersbury House was demolished. The site covered three acres, the largest construction site in Europe. It is hoped to link up what was found there with what was uncovered on the adjacent no.1 Poultry and Walbrook House sites. Besides relocating the Temple of Mithras site, two big questions were answered. One was the location of Watling Street where it crosses the area – this was the main East-West Roman road through London and ran to Colchester. And also running across the site was the Walbrook, perhaps more a braided stream than a “river”. An important source of fresh water it ran southward from the Hackney area through London clay. The Romans had tried to “manage” it – there was evidence of man-made channels – in order to filter it into one place so they could build on the site. There were timber revetments incorporating 27 centimetre-thick planks – the team are awaiting dendrochronological dates. The possible remains of a bridge were found which may have carried Watling Street over the Walbrook, which was obviously a focus of life and industry in the area. It has not been above ground since the 16th century, by which time it had become an open sewer. Attempts to conduit it were not altogether successful so the site has remained wet, but this is good for preservation - objects came out of the site looking like new, for example brooches were still in good enough condition to be attached to clothing.

There were four main areas of excavation, involving about 40 trenches, some 7 metres deep which tended to fill with water where they went down below the water table. The first trench was put in over the known site of the Temple of Mithras, a scheduled ancient monument, and the wall foundations were located – they are still there, now under 4 metres of sand and a concrete slab. The archaeology on the site was “phenomenal”. There were over 8000 contexts, 300 timber records, 2.7 tons of pottery, 1.5 tons of animal bone, 10,000 accessioned finds - they still have questions about some of the objects (they are open to suggestions). A volunteer metal detectorist worked on the site for eighteen months and found 80% of the metalwork finds. Dates went down to 50AD.

The Romans had first built a series of one metre high banks and half a metre deep ditches, perhaps forming a rectilinear enclosure. It may have been some sort of camp. There was a hearth with crucibles, perhaps for metalworking, bits of several types of armour, military tokens, a pair of military boots, several phallic/fist amulets, probably good luck charms. Some items came from the Roman cavalry, e.g. decorations for harness found together, proving what had previously only been suspected, that these types of object do belong together. All of these, dated from the late 50s to 60AD, may be signs of early military activity in the area. In the 60-65AD period, serious construction began. The Romans raised the land one metre by dumping material. They filled wooden boxes with soil to provide platforms for buildings, probably two-storey houses and workshops incorporating oak beams – they hammered in timber piles and on top laid timber baseplates, one of which yielded a dendro date of 63AD. There were timber and clay walls surviving in places up to 1 metre high, some plastered and even replastered. The buildings would have had shops at the front and private living quarters behind. There were 13 buildings in just one of the excavation areas, dating between 63AD to 120AD. Timber drains had once had lids and could have carried fresh water or foul. A lot of the fences found may have been made from ready-made fencing panels. But the buildings tended to rot away because of the local conditions and had to be replaced. In places cow scapulae had been used to repair holes. There were also animal pens which would have been surrounded by wattle fences; one had a tiled floor – there was a piglet buried nearby. Some house floors had wafer-thin planks across the doorway laid over a drain running into the property, and one house had a collection of coins buried underneath the doorway. A first century circular structure had a partly surviving domed roof – perhaps a bakery; it contained shells of cockroaches, the earliest found in Roman Britain. One very large building which had burnt down in c125AD, perhaps during the Hadrianic fire, may have been a water mill, with an adjacent water channel; this is being intensively studied.

Yvonne Masson