Archaeologists of the Thames foreshore are blessed with two enormous parallel ‘sites’ to work on: riverbanks stretching from Erith in the east, to Richmond in the west – essentially the entire tidal reach of the river, where the movement of water is constantly uncovering artefacts and features spanning much of human history. In one respect, this makes our work easy – as the Thames Discovery Programme’s Senior Community Archaeologist Helen Johnston told delegates at the most recent CA conference, ‘we don’t dig: the river does it for us’ – but the scale of the Thames foreshore and the speed of its erosion also presents challenges. Its expanse is way beyond the capacity of any small professional team to record and monitor – which is where the Thames Discovery Programme (TDP) and its army of volunteers comes in.
Towards the end of 2018, the TDP celebrated its tenth year on the Thames foreshore – testament to the enthusiasm, skill, and commitment of our volunteers, who venture out in all weathers to record exposed archaeology before it is eroded away, and to help communicate the history of the river to as wide an audience as possible. The project is also endebted to pioneers of intertidal archaeology including, but not limited to, Mortimer Wheeler, Ivor Noël Hume, Geoff Egan, Gustav Milne, and Tony Pilson – their work, along with that of many local societies and the extensive surveys of our predecessor the Thames Archaeological Survey (TAS – see CA 343) in the 1990s, laid the foundations on which the TDP has flourished.
As with many community archaeology projects, our first funding came from the Heritage Lottery Fund, which supported three years of work based at Thames Estuary Partnership and the Thames Explorer Trust (see CA 244). When this funding ended in in 2011, TDP joined MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology), allowing us to benefit from the expertise of specialist colleagues across the organisation. TDP has also been able to contribute its own foreshore expertise to commercial schemes and the development of other intertidal projects, notably the Coastal and Intertidal Zone Archaeological Network (CITiZAN – see CA 306 and 324). Since 2016, we have also expanded our outreach, working with the over-75s and younger Londoners in an initiative supported by the City Bridge Trust and Tideway (the London ‘super sewer’ project). But how does the TDP operate?
