London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
Daily word time.
In the beginning was the word.
And today’s word is wreck.
Good, crunchy little word, wreck.
A wreck is what’s left when things have gone badly wrong.
A car wreck. A train wreck. A nervous wreck.
And, of course, a shipwreck.
It’s an old word. It comes into English from the world of ships and the sea. Old Norse rek, something driven ashore. Something cast up by the sea.
And there’s the important bit.
A wreck isn’t necessarily something that’s been destroyed. Originally it’s something that’s been driven. Driven ashore. Cast up.
Which brings us to London.
And to one particular wreck.
Because exactly 64 years ago today, on September 6th, 1962, a young archaeologist named Peter Marsden was keeping an eye on some construction work beside the Thames at Blackfriars.
And London did what London sometimes does.
It opened a trapdoor.
Down they went through 1962.
Down through Victorian London.
Down through Georgian London.
Down through Shakespeare’s London.
Down through medieval London.
And there, underneath the lot of it, was a ship.
A Roman ship.
Think about that.
You’re standing beside the Thames in the London of Harold Macmillan. The Beatles are just about to release their first single. James Bond is about to arrive in the cinemas. People are driving Morris Minors and Ford Anglias.
And somebody digs a hole.
And out of that hole comes a ship from the second century AD.
Not a model.
Not a picture of one on a mosaic.
Not a description by some Roman writer.
The ship.
Its timbers.
Its great oak frames.
Its planking.
Its iron nails.
Its mast-step.
The bones of a working vessel that had sailed these waters something like eighteen hundred years earlier.
And this wasn’t some little Thames rowing boat.
This was a serious piece of maritime machinery.
About 52 to 55 feet long. Roughly 17 metres. Broad in the beam. Flat-bottomed. Oak-built. A mast. A sail.
A working cargo ship.
A sea-going ship.
Indeed, Peter Marsden would later describe it as the oldest sea-going sailing ship yet discovered in northern Europe.
And when it went down, it wasn’t empty.
It was carrying something like 26 tons of Kentish ragstone.
Building stone.
And that’s when this wreck stops being merely an archaeological curiosity and starts talking to us about London.
Because where was all that stone going?
Almost certainly into Roman London.
Into Londinium.
Into the city that was growing here beside the Thames.
Walls. Buildings. Quays. Public works.
In other words, Roman London wasn’t some sleepy little provincial settlement at the chilly end of the Empire.
It was hungry.
Hungry for stone.
Hungry for timber.
Hungry for pottery, food, wine, oil, people.
And the Thames was feeding it.
That’s the thing we have to get into our heads.
For Roman London, the Thames wasn’t scenery.
It wasn’t something you looked at from a riverside apartment.
It wasn’t where you went for a Sunday stroll.
It was the motorway.
It was the freight railway.
It was the loading bay.
It was London’s great commercial artery.
And this ship was one of the lorries.
Except this lorry had probably been to sea.
There was evidence of shipworm in its timbers, the marine mollusc that bores into wooden hulls. That strongly suggests this vessel had spent time in salt water.
So picture her.
Coming up the Thames.
Sail above her.
Kentish stone piled aboard.
Roman London appearing ahead.
Warehouses.
Wharves.
Smoke.
Cries from the waterfront.
Other vessels manoeuvring in the river.
And then something goes wrong.
There’s evidence that the cargo shifted violently to port.
Marsden came to believe the ship may have collided with another vessel.
She heels over.
Water comes in.
Twenty-six tons of stone aren’t going to help matters.
And down she goes.
Nobody knows whether anybody died.
Nobody knows exactly what happened in those final moments.
But the ship went to the bottom.
The Thames covered her.
Silt covered her.
London forgot her.
And then came September 6th, 1962.
Peter Marsden was just 26 years old.
That’s another part of this story I love.
Not some venerable professor with white hair and fifty years behind him.
A young archaeologist.
And he’d found something extraordinary.
There was another surprise waiting in those timbers.
The ship didn’t look quite as Roman as you might expect.
Its construction belonged to a northern European tradition that came to be described as Romano-Celtic.
That matters.
Because there’s a tendency, when we talk about Roman Britain, to imagine everything flowing in one direction.
Rome arrives.
Rome teaches.
Britons learn.
Civilisation delivered, signed for, thank you very much.
But history is rarely that tidy.
The Blackfriars ship suggested something more interesting.
Roman London was a meeting place.
Roman technology. Native technology. Different shipbuilding traditions. Different peoples. Different skills.
All meeting here.
On the Thames.
London doing what London has always done.
Taking things from everywhere and turning them into something of its own.
And there was one especially lovely little find aboard the ship.
A bronze coin of the Emperor Domitian had been placed in the mast-step.
Not loose change dropped by some sailor.
Placed there.
A votive offering.
A little appeal to the gods.
Keep this ship safe.
Keep the men aboard her safe.
Bring us home.
The gods, on this occasion, appear not to have been listening.
The ship sank.
But the offering stayed where it had been put.
For roughly eighteen centuries.
Until Peter Marsden came along.
There’s something wonderfully intimate about that.
Twenty-six tons of stone tell you about the Roman economy.
The oak timbers tell you about Roman and Celtic shipbuilding.
The shipworm tells you the vessel went to sea.
But that little coin tells you about a human being.
Somebody stood on that ship.
Somebody worried about what might happen out on the water.
Somebody wanted a little supernatural insurance.
And somebody pushed a coin into the mast-step and hoped for the best.
That person has no name.
We don’t know where he was born.
We don’t know what language he spoke.
We don’t know whether he was Roman, British, Gaulish, Germanic or something else altogether.
But for one tiny moment, across eighteen hundred years, we can almost reach out and touch him.
That’s archaeology.
And that’s London.
The city doesn’t just have a history.
It’s sitting on it.
Layer upon layer upon layer.
And every so often somebody puts a spade into the ground and London says:
Oh, yes.
Nearly forgot.
You might want to have a look at this.
A Roman wall.
A mosaic.
A skeleton.
A temple.
Or, on September 6th, 1962…
a ship.
A ship that went down carrying stone to build Roman London.
And in the end became part of Roman London itself.
Buried beneath the city it had come to build.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
Streets ahead.
And sometimes…
eighteen hundred years behind.
Another fascinating insight. Thankyou