My final geographically themed review focuses on London. I touched on some sites there in my reviews of Roman archaeology and the Thames (CA 330 and CA 343), so these columns will look more widely across modern-day Greater London. There is so much to report from the city that this will inevitably be a snapshot: this month focusing on prehistoric and Roman sites, and next month on medieval and post-medieval ones. An excellent recent ‘state of the city’ report to start with comes in CA 313 (April 2016), which reported on the wealth of sites of all ages examined during the Crossrail Project.
Prehistoric London
Thanks to the long-running Thames Discovery Programme, the river provides the most extensive range of prehistoric sites of Greater London: there have been in-depth reviews in CA 158 (July 1998), CA 244 (July 2010), and CA 350 (May 2019). However, there have been few prehistoric sites and finds reported over the years from elsewhere in the city. The only survey occurred in CA 124 (May 1991), and the only early prehistoric cover-story came in CA 60 (February 1978), on a Mesolithic site in, of all places, the middle of Hampstead Heath. Other sites and finds of this period have since followed, including another surprising find and location – that of a Mesolithic trackway within the grounds of Belmarsh Prison in Woolwich in CA 236 (November 2009). The Neolithic is even more sparsely covered, with the Thames the sole source of any significant finds.
Only in the Bronze Age do the finds increase, and then only modestly. For example, a Bronze Age trackway was reported in CA 143 (June 1995) in Rainham, east London, during the construction of a Tesco superstore there, and CA 358 (January 2020) and CA 368 (November 2020) feature the Havering late Bronze Age hoard. The latter is the biggest single prehistoric find within Greater London of recent times (and the third biggest such hoard of this date in the UK), discovered at Wennington in east London ahead of major gravel-quarrying works. In total, 453 bronze and copper objects and fragments were recovered amid a landscape known to be scattered with Bronze Age enclosures (the site was initially identified thanks to a 1961 aerial photo of an intriguing crop-mark). But perhaps the most famous of all archaeological sites of this era in London is that of the late Bronze Age cursus beneath modern-day Heathrow in west London, examined in depth in CA 99 (February 1986), and re-examined during work on Heathrow Terminal 5 – see CA 256 (July 2011) and CA 407 (February 2024).
Urbicide: killing the city