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No.55 April 2003 | Contex HOME RECENT EXCAVATIONS AT BLOSSOM’S INN ROSE BAILLIE Fate delayed the arrival of our AGM lecturer Bruce Watson until much later than expected. However as he was to speak on one of the most interesting London excavations of recent years and there was plentiful wine available, it was a wait we bore with equanimity. When John Stow wrote his Survey of London in 1598 he noted of the Gresham St. area, "Antiquities I found none other than that … one large Inn, for receipt of travellers called Blossom’s Inn, but corruptly Bosoms Inn, as hath to sign St Laurence the Deacon, in a border of blossoms or flowers". Despite this MoLAS have found a wealth of archaeology at various Gresham Street addresses, including the major redevelopment on the former site of Blossom’s Inn. Excavations by MoLAS took place between over a year beginning in December 2000, in collaboration with AOC Archaeology and were sponsored by Land Securities plc. Excavations were conducted in close collaboration with the developers, with major engineering work going on at the same time, which led to some frank discussions as interesting discoveries multiplied and time pressures mounted. An added complication was the frequent presence of a TV film crew making a Time Team Special programme. The first indication of near-by settlement was a burial of the 1st Century BC; one wonders about the circumstances, as the body was prone and the bones apparently disturbed by animals. The area was peripheral to the earliest Roman settlement and only began to be developed significantly with the construction of gravel roads after the Boudiccan revolt. Curiously, several partly articulated horses were buried within the road, then sealed by later layers of metalling. A large wet hollow dug for gravel yielded a notable early discovery, the life-size hand and forearm of a gilded bronze statue. It is tempting to believe that this is part of a public or civic statue of the Emperor Nero, which was hacked up as a mark of disrespect after his overthrow in 68AD. The site was very large and complex and some Roman features were found that could belong to structures found in earlier excavations. Eg. Two large walls in the NE of the site were probably part of a colonnaded building first seen in the 1950’s. It featured a massive pier base constructed of poured concrete between sheets of Purbeck marble, an unusual procedure. Whether this public building, possibly a temple, was related to the near-by amphitheatre and fort is not yet known. However it appears for much of the Roman period this eastern side of the site was undeveloped open ground, often used for rubbish dumping, including building rubble. Amongst this was found sizeable pieces of wall plaster. Hoping that these had painting on their underside all the fragments were blocked by MoLSS conservation staff. The Time Team crew took great delight in filming the tricky lifting process in the hopes seeing something dropped!. As it happened they bore high quality paintings of figures and fruits, which was probably a scene of Bacchus carousing with his lady friends. The original context of these wall paintings is not known, but they were probably adorned the dinning room walls of a smart town house nearby that was demolished or redecorated during the early C2nd AD. Elsewhere the remains of more mundane domestic buildings were found in the Mumford Court area of the site, and also in the Milk Street frontage, which had yielded a mosaic in a previous excavation (on display in the MoL). The star discoveries of the site were two very large, 5m deep timber lined wells containing the remains of two different sorts of water lifting mechanisms. These were dug in very wet, unstable ground and required massive shoring, both in the Roman period and when re-excavated, leading to some amusing TV footage, as Site Supervisor Ian Blair went ever deeper and got ever muddier as he struggled to reach the bottom. The first well has been dated to 63-4AD by dendrochronology and had apparently collapsed after about 10 years. In its base was a large softwood cask, into which had tumbled 12 wooden boxes, open on their top side, that were linked together to form a bucket chain. The second well was built around 109AD and was used for 20-30 years before its superstructure was destroyed by fire. Its lifting mechanism was made of wrought iron links connecting wooden buckets of up to 6 litre capacity. A further pit, lined with reused house timbers between the two wells may have been a storage cistern or used as a drainage sump during the second well’s construction. The discovery of these water lifting mechanisms at Blossom’s Inn during 2001 coincided with the discovery later in the same year of a similar bucket chain in a well at Arthur Street, and rediscovery in the LAARC of two well preserved, but unrecognised, wooden buckets from a deep lined well found the 1955-6 excavations of the near-by Cheapside Roman Baths. These discoveries have led to renewed discussion of the extent to which such technologically sophisticated Roman engineering devices were used in the Atlantic provinces. A reconstruction of one of the water lifting mechanisms from the second well has been made with sponsorship by Swiss Re and is now displayed in the Museum of London Rotunda garden. A further Time Team programme about the reconstruction of the water lifting mechanism was broadcast in April 2003. (Doubtless to reappear on Discovery Channel). It is tempting to link these wells with the Cheapside baths, but as they would have produced great quantities of very good quality water Bruce believes that they would have functioned as part of a public water supply system. Bruce Watson and his team deserve many congratulations for a outstandingly successful excavation in demanding circumstances. We have only heard of the Roman highlights, hopefully we will eventually get to hear if he ever did find the old Blossom’s Inn. |
