The Spitalfields suburb c1539-1880: excavations at Spitalfields Market, London, E1, 1991-2007 (selected pages) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Excavations at Crispin Street, Spitalfields: From Roman
2015
This article describes archaeological investigations undertaken by Pre-Construct Archaeology Ltd on land off Crispin Street, Spitalfields, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. A total of 36 Roman inhumation burials dating from the 2nd and 3rd centuries ad, forming part of the extra-mural cemetery alongside Ermine Street were identified. Unusual burials included a decapitated individual. During the late 13th century the site was bisected by the outer precinct boundary of the Priory and Hospital of St Mary Spital. This boundary which was delineated by a ditch and bank was to remain extant in one form or another on roughly the same alignment until the present development. Just prior to the Dissolution in 1538 a brick wall was constructed around the outer precinct, which was leased to the Guild of Artillery of Longbows, Crossbows and Handguns for the purpose of artillery practice. By the late 17th century the first houses were constructed along Crispin Street, backing on to the preci...
City and suburbs: London 1400-1700
Evolução da Paisagem Urbana Cidade E Periferia, 2014
London’s physical and demographic expansion between 1500 and 1700 was dramatic. The population of the city and its suburbs grew from about 50,000 to almost half a million inhabitants. Almost all this increase was in the suburbs, particularly to the west, north and east of the walled city. These developments raise important questions about their effects upon the city’s economy, population and the physical environment, especially in the expanding suburbs. The purpose of this paper is to examine the suburban growth of London, first of all setting out some of the main characteristics of this growth in the early modern period. Next the paper will draw on the results of some major research projects carried out by the Centre for Metropolitan History. These have integrated a range of longitudinal and cross-sectional sources, which survive in abundance for early modern London. These enable detailed ‘micro-histories’ to be written of individual properties and their occupants in sample areas of the city, which provide insights into themes such as household size, the physical size and layout of houses, and the changing urban landscape. The paper presents some conclusions arising from the research into the eastern area of Aldgate, which grew very dramatically in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There was considerable demand for housing, and multiple occupancy was common and often achieved through the physical division of houses. As the area became built up, patterns can be seen in the development of gardens behind main street frontages into alley ways and courts, around which new tenements were constructed. Most of this was uncoordinated and re-use of older structures was common. On the other hand, the differences between the suburbs and the central parishes should not be over stated.
London's Waterfront 1100–1666: summary of intended publication
This monograph brings together the archaeological and documentary evidence for a number of medieval and post-medieval secular properties and a parish church on four waterfront sites excavated in the City of London by the Museum of London in 1974–84: from west to east, Swan Lane (site A), Seal House (site B), New Fresh Wharf (site C) and Billingsgate Lorry Park (site D). Here the findings for the period 1100 to 1666 (the Great Fire of London) are presented. The waterfront excavations in London since 1972 have produced great advances in our knowledge about the nature of reclamation on the river bank and extension of properties into the river; the inclusion of a multitude of artefacts and pottery sherds in the reclamation and foreshore deposits are an unequalled catalogue of the material culture of medieval London; and the carpentry of the wooden revetment have consequences for study of medieval buildings which have otherwise not survived in London to be recorded. The excavation narrative is arranged in four consecutive periods from 1100 to 1666. The nature of London's waterfront, including its public buildings and Thames Street itself, is considered for each period; the developing relationship of the waterfront area to the rest of the medieval and Tudor City of London is also outlined. A first overall objective is to study the local environment and topography, the riverfront, its buildings and churches, to provide the setting for the lives of the people who lived and worked there. The wider area of the study is the waterfront south of Thames Street between the sites of the 11th-century All Hallows the Great church in the west (today just to the east of Cannon Street railway station viaduct) and the probably 10th-century Billingsgate dock in the east, a length of about 475m (about 1550ft). Just over half way long this length of waterfront, the north end of medieval London Bridge met the bank of the river and the street. The focus of research is two blocks of properties, eight tenements upstream of the Bridge, labelled for this study Tenements 1–8; and a second block downstream of the bridge, labelled Tenements 9–16. Generally it was only the parts nearest to Thames Street, which would have contained the most important buildings, which were excavated; documents, early views and maps provide context and setting. The excavations here of 1974 to 1984 are the main focus of this study, but more recent excavations of 2003–6 on some of the same properties and nearby are fitted into the narrative, with their complementary results. Between 1100 and 1666 the waterfront area of the City of London, between Thames Street and the River Thames, grew by extension into the river, until fossilised by the erection of stone river walls. By the end of the main periods of reclamation, around 1450, the new land south of the street could be up to 100m wide, formed by innumerable expansions on private properties, which had the effect of making indented inlets or docks for ships at Queenhithe and Billingsgate. Earth and rubbish were used to make the reclamation units, which are often dated by the dendrochronology of timbers used in the waterfront structures (Fig 1).
‘A 17th-century City merchant’s house at 7a Laurence Pountney Hill and its medieval predecessor'
Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 61, 2010 (with C. Phillpotts)
This article traces the history of 7a Laurence Pountney Hill, a rare surviving 17th-century merchant's house in the City of London. The house is built on quite extensive medieval remains, including a massive retaining wall for the former churchyard of St Laurence Pountney. The authors describe the evidence for the house of c.1670, and for later alterations of the 18th and 19th centuries. Documentary evidence for the occupiers of the house is integrated into the narrative.
The rich among the poor: neighbourly interaction in London’s eastern suburb, 1540–1700
2009
The rich among the poor: neighbourly interaction in London's eastern suburb, 1540-1700 A paper that sets out to examine social relations between the richer inhabitants of London's eastern suburb with their poorer neighbours perhaps requires some initial explanation. First off, given the reputations of our fellow panellists for their work on the poor and marginal within metropolitan society, we had anticipated that a discussion of the city's wealthier inhabitants might provide a novel twist to today's session-a notion, which alongside our rather unsubtle inversion of the title of Jeremy's influential essay on 'the poor among the rich', has seemingly provoked a response in the title of his and Leonard's paper. Secondly, an investigation of the activities of the affluent in London's eastern suburb may seem a rather curious undertaking, given that from at least the sixteenth century onwards the area has been overwhelmingly associated with the poorest inhabitants of the capital. Yet as demonstrated by Jeremy's work on the poor within a (supposedly) socially exclusive district of the West End, a study of social relations between the members of the very top and very bottom of a local society can be immensely rewarding. For while it would, of course, be futile to challenge the overall picture of the poverty of the eastern suburbs, the area once housed a number of extremely rich residents, and wealthy individuals continued to live there, albeit as a much smaller proportion of the population, into the eighteenth century. [SLIDE OF STUDY AREA] Covering an area of almost eighty acres outside the eastern part of the city wall, the parishes of St Botolph Aldgate and Holy Trinity Minories are the focus of the ESRC-funded project 'Life in the Suburbs'. Roughly half of St Botolph's constituted the city ward of Portsoken, while the remaining half, the district of East Smithfield was formally part of Middlesex. This region of the metropolis experienced a quite remarkable phase of population growth and industrial expansion over the early modern period. In 1540 it was characterised by its gardens and wasteland, and housed less than 2000 people, including a number of wealthy residents, who, attracted by the space and cheap land prices, had built themselves substantial properties there. By 1700, however, it was densely built up with a population approaching 20,000 people, its once open spaces having long disappeared under networks of proliferating alleys and closes. It was here that the vast majority of its characteristically poor residents crammed themselves into inferior dwellings, surrounded by brewhouses, armament works, and manufacturers of tallow, saltpetre and other noxious substances. We can be fairly certain that the overall proportion of substantial households in the area decreased markedly over this period, and the Table gives a general impression of this trend in Portsoken ward, based on assessments of wealth taken at different moments of time.
Rematerialising metropolitan histories? People, places and things in modern London
Crossing Paths or Sharing …, 2009
"In recent years historians have begun to show renewed interest in studying ‘the material’ dimensions to urban life. This shift has opened up a space for new dialogues between historians and post-medieval archaeologists working on British cities. It offers the potential for reassessing approaches to studying the urban past and for experimenting with fresh methodologies. Noting that archaeological perspectives have been largely absent from recent historical accounts of the modern metropolis, in this chapter we explore the potential for pursuing collaborative research that fuses archaeological evidence and thinking with other forms of historical practice to write material histories of London. The discussion divides into three parts. First, we sketch the post-war development of urban post-medieval archaeology in London, and the range of archaeological collections and excavation sites that relate to the Georgian and Victorian city. Second, we consider some of the ways in which the analysis of these sources might be used in interdisciplinary urban historiography, especially in the light of methodological approaches developed in North American and Australian urban archaeology. Third, we present a case study that explores how nineteenth-century household archaeologies in London might be developed, examining some of the complexities and challenges of integrating archaeological methods into the study of households and localities in the nineteenth-century metropolis. In conclusion we consider the prospects for the development of interdisciplinary approaches to the material remains of London’s modern past."
Down at the old Ship and Ball — taverns, trade and daily life in the London Borough of Southwark
Post-Medieval Archaeology, 2016
Southwark over the past 50 years have proved to be a very prolific source of evidence for the material culture of people living in this part of London from the 16th century onwards. This lecture, the fourth held by SPMA in honour of the late Geoff Egan, focuses on a remarkably rich and varied assemblage of 17th-and 18th-century artefacts excavated on a site in Tanner Street in 2012. Covering a wide spectrum of activities, occupations and levels of society, these include ceramics, glass, clay tobacco pipes, pewter, copper-alloy, wood, leather, bone and ivory, with objects as diverse as cloth seals, spoons, book mounts, wine bottles and glasses, bird feeders and a mallet for playing pall mall, and sources ranging from the English Midlands to the Far East.
Antiquaries Journal 99, 63-94, 2019
The area around the north end of the medieval London Bridge in the City of London has attracted much archaeological attention. This article summarises the main findings for the period 1100-1666 from four excavations, recently published. In doing so, it explores a number of key issues: the main characteristics of this waterfront area in the medieval and Tudor periods; the sources of the pottery and artefacts incorporated into reclamation units, and any significance in their locations behind waterfront revetments or on the foreshore; what the medieval and post-medieval artefacts say about culture, fashion and religious beliefs; the functions of the buildings and open areas, and to what extent these can be linked to owners or occupiers specified in the documentary record; and how the port of London fits within its European trading network. The article also examines if and to what extent the area south of Thames Street was an industrial suburb of the medieval City. Here also lay the parish church of St Botolph Billingsgate, destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and not rebuilt, many details of which can be reconstructed from archaeology and rich documentary evidence. Sixty-nine human burials in the church include one of a man in his sixties who may be John Reynewell, mayor of London in 1426-7. The several thousand artefacts and several hundred kilos of English and foreign pottery (the latter now analysed into over 100 separate wares) from the four sites in the study deserve further research by scholars, who can use this article as a stepping stone into the archive held at the Museum of London.