The working life of Museum of London

Walking along Lower Thames Street in the City of London few people probably realise that some of Roman London’s best remains lie hidden beneath their feet.

The Billingsgate Roman house and baths was first discovered in 1848. Today its remains lie under the buildings at 101 Lower Thames Street and are not generally open to the public.

As part of the Festival of British Archaeology, the Billingsgate Roman House and Baths was open to the public on Saturday 23 July and proved so popular that to support Open House London there is another chance to visit the site on Saturday 17 September between 11am and 4.30pm.

Due to the deteriorating condition of the remains a condition survey was undertaken and its recommendations are now being implemented. The conservation programme was commissioned through the City Surveyors Department at the City of London Corporation, who have very generously funded the project. The work is now being undertaken by Nimbus Conservation. In addition, conservation and site management and interpretation students from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London are helping with the work.

One of their tools to help clear surface debris prior to the more delicate conservation work may raise a smile…

The site is located at 101 Lower Thames Street, EC3 close to Monument or Tower Hill tube stations, and staff will be on hand from the museum should you pop along on 17 September (no booking required).

A website (external link) has been set up by the students to explain the work being undertaken and progress can also be followed on Facebook (external link) and Twitter (external link).

If Charles Dickens was alive today do you think he would be part of the Twitterati or an avid Facebook fan? (Remember, this is the man who in September 1860 burnt the majority of his correspondence).

Here at the Museum of London we have decided to honour Dickens’ work with a major exhibition Dickens and London which opens on 9 December 2011 in advance of the 200th anniversary of his birth, in 2012.

We have plans for a number of social media initiatives that we hope will enhance both the exhibition and your visit, the first of which launches this Monday 12 September – a virtual Dickens Book Club’s on both Twitter and Facebook.

Although an open forum to discuss all aspects of Dickens’s work, we will be suggesting a book a month to read and posting our thoughts (and hopefully chatting to you about your thoughts) across both Twitter and Facebook starting with September’s chosen novel: Great Expectations.

Other confirmed titles so far include: A Christmas Carol (naturally for December!), Barnaby Rudge in January 2012 (we will let you into a secret, this is such a large novel someone in the office is already reading it!) and Oliver Twist in April 2012.

So why not join us as we explore some of Dickens’ greatest works alongside some of his lesser known titles.

We are also looking for you to suggest titles to include so if you have a favourite please do let us know either via Twitter or Facebook and we will try to feature them before the exhibition closes on 10 June 2012.

Our Twitter and Facebook accounts will also be home to sneak previews of what to expect when you visit the exhibition and insights from our exhibition curators via our blog pages again in advance and during the course of the exhibition, so be sure to follow us or check our website regularly.

Look out too for an exciting short story initiative launching in November based on some of Dickens’ ideas for stories and characters which did not find their way into print.

During the course of building developments within the museum, some of the conservation boxes with skeletal material in the rotunda store had to be moved from their shelf locations and temporarily stored elsewhere.

Once the building work was complete the boxes could be returned to the store but in turn needed to be located back on to different shelves and the inventory updated.  With the return of the boxes and the gaining of some new space within the store there was an opportunity for a rationalising of the space and re grouping of the boxes from the sites currently curated by the museum. As there are over 17,000 individuals curated that equates to a very substantial number of boxes and a major task.

The moving of the boxes and rationalising of the space within the store needed to take place in July in order to be ready to accept more material from other sites.

The endeavour of moving several hundred boxes to new locations in the store was a task that our curators would need assistance with to be able to complete and achieve the target. Most opportunely help was at hand in the guise of three willing work experience volunteers: Liam, Amelia and Kate.

Jelena Bekvalac, Curator Human Osteology explains more…

We had the pleasure here at the Centre for Human Bioarchaeology during two weeks in July to have three lovely work experience students with us, Liam Bateson, Amelia Stephenson and Kate Marrion. They were all extremely helpful, interested and really ably assisted in our grand task of rationalising the boxed skeletal material in the rotunda, re-labelling boxes and up dating the inventory.

Amelia and Kate although here with us for a shorter time aided in moving material from the lab back to the rotunda, assisted in replacing boxes on to the correct shelves, labelling boxes and listing new locations of the boxes which, are integral to the up keep of the inventory so we know where all the boxes are correctly located.

Liam and Kate were also able to participate in a session about object handling and so saw another aspect and objects in the museum. With the assistance of our plastic cast skeleton Dr W we were able to go through the names of the bones in the skeleton and how they articulate with one another. They all proved to be keen learners and had very good osteological aptitude, young osteologists in the making!

Liam was at the forefront of box moving and relocation being involved for a longer time period. Additionally to moving all of the boxes a record of their new locations had to be listed for the inventory to be updated and new location labels on the boxes. Once again Liam, Amelia and Kate rose to the challenge and diligently labelled the boxes and listed the new locations.  The task took considerable effort, was physically demanding when moving the boxes around and often very dusty. The boxes have now all been relocated, space created and new inventory locations noted, a great accomplishment. This outstanding achievement in the store could not have been reached without the help and hard work of Liam, Amelia and Kate, they were superb.

We try to to accommodate work experience requests when certain suitable tasks such as this reorganisation arise, my best advice if you are interested in helping us is to keep checking the museums website here.

Liam also found the time to write up his thoughts on his work experience for our blog which he shares with you now:

When looking for work experience I did not go out searching for a job in the Museum of London’s Centre for Human bioarchaeology. My specification was simple; something at least vaguely interesting. I tried various jobs; one of these trains of thought was working in a lab. This is the train that lead me into this job.

I had no real presumptions of what exactly it would be like other than the names of the people I would be working with and that there would be skeletons involved. When I told people what I was doing for work experience they stared blankly back at me bewildered. No one I knew prior to the work experience had any idea exactly what was in store for me. Up until now I haven’t actually explained what the department does. It’s simple; it studies human remains from the London area. These are uncovered from archaeological sites mostly from construction sites. The department is host to over 17,000 individuals more than half from one site; Spitalfields (with roughly 10,500 individuals) and so it is a brilliant resource for budding osteologists.

First impressions were good, it was a friendly environment and I was not set menial tasks which could bore me to death (which I have been told happens with lots of work experience). What it has made apparent to me is one, how tiring work is and two, that it is slightly more relaxed than I had previously expected.

For the largest part of my work experience I have been helping rearrange the boxes in the rotunda to create space and a form of organisation. I have also done some work on the human skeleton so I can (slightly unreliably) name all of the bones in the body (saving individual carpals, tarsals, ribs and some bones in the skull). I can now correctly lay out a skeleton and find its gender. And possibly have a rather shaky guess at the age.

Osteology aside, I have picked up some skills in logistics and some invaluable experience in the workplace.  However saying this it has not made much different to my future aims for work (my life plain is still completely indecisive after university).  

And lastly I want to say thank you to everyone who has helped me or let me help them in my work experience, it was a pleasure.

In this blog post, you can gain an insight into the work to support our current display Freedom from: Modern slavery in the capital from Exhibitions Project Manager, Elizabeth Scott:

I was up on the museums roof recently, sun in the sky, the smell of tar boiling in a pot, with the aim of inspecting builder’s work boots.

It’s not your average day, but when you’re working on exhibitions there never really is a typical day.

I was on the roof with the photographer Chris Steele-Perkins who the museum has commissioned to take 11 photographs (a mixture of portraits and representations) for the exhibition.

The exhibition is about human trafficking and enslavement in 21st century London and shares the stories of individuals who have survived being trafficked to London and individuals from a range of professions that support trafficked people or strive to combat trafficking.

For one of the images Chris wanted to photograph a pair of builder’s boots, they had to be well worn and say “I belong to a construction worker” in an instant.

After a quick inspection he found the right pair.

How old do you think these boots are?

Answer: 2 months old! Making steel toe-capped boots must be a lucrative business.

Thank you to the guys who let us interrupt their day and gave up their boots to model.

To see the final image be sure to visit the exhibition which is on at the Museum of London until 20 November 2011.

What do sugar, bridge construction, the Temperance Movement and the discovery of a pre-historic skeleton have in common? Well, they are just some of the subjects documented in the archive of the Port of London Authority (PLA) housed at the Museum of London Docklands.

Cataloguer, Marie-Claire Wyatt, explains more:

A few months ago the project to document the PLA Archive entered an exciting new stage, with the start of formal cataloguing. As you can see from the examples above, the archive has a very broad range of contents. However, its primary purpose is to document the history of the docks of London since the creation of the first enclosed dock system (the West India Docks) in 1799, along with the administration of the River Thames. The archive was collected during the 1970s and 1980s and has hitherto received very little cataloguing. The archive is quite disorganised, with no trace of “original order” – the structure of the papers while they were in use by their creators.

We have therefore chosen to give the archive a structure based on business function. It is deeply satisfying reuniting records which have been separated ever since their arrival at Museum of London Docklands and creating a formal structure which will enable the full history of the dock companies to be properly interpreted.

Due to the size of the collection, as a first stage we are concentrating upon the records of the nineteenth century docks. The docks were built by private dock companies over a period between 1799 and 1886, and were subject to the normal practices of competition and the need to offer shareholders an annual dividend. Relations between the dock companies could therefore be highly strained at times, a subject to which I hope to return in a future post.

Each dock company is being catalogued individually, and to get a sense of how this might work we began by listing the records of the East India Dock Company and the West India Dock Company, both companies with relatively small archives and therefore a simple collection structure. The catalogues for these will eventually live on MIMSY, the Museum’s catalogue system.

For these we tried listing everything at a very detailed level, so each minute book, financial ledger and file of papers documenting the construction or extension of the docks has been given its own description.  This is how I prefer to catalogue: it improves my knowledge of the creator and the background to the collection, in most cases the individual items are interesting in themselves and the descriptions are the most useful to researchers. It is, however, very time-consuming!

Having cut our teeth on these two small sub-collections, we moved on to cataloguing the archive of the longest-lived of the companies, the East and West India Dock Company (EWIDC)….more on this in my next update!

As we gear up for our Gladiator Games next month, we have the latest update from our gladiators in training to share with you.

Britannia (our gladiator re-enactors) recently attended a training session at the Lunt in Coventry (a reconstructed wooden Roman fort). The event was captured by professional photographer Pete Webb and will feature in the June issue of the science and technology magazine, Flipside (external link).

The Lunt is a great site and has the advantage of a sand filled wooden Gyrus (circular Roman cavalry training area).

Gladiators are starting to wear the full equipment as you can see from the images. Not only that, but this was their first training on deep sand, a surface we hope to have at the Guildhall in July.

The advantage of this material is the grip underfoot and the fact that it’s easier to land without serious impact injury – however it’s very tiring to work on, and it’s easier to see why excavated gladiator skeletons have more developed ankle bones than seen on other bodies from this time period.

Catch-up on our earlier training updates by clicking on ‘Special Events’ in the ‘Categories’ option to the right of this post and look our for more news from our gladiators as the games draw closer.

Images copyright Pete Webb / Flipside Magazine.

Should you have visited the Museum of London over the last few months, you may have noticed the scaffolding and tarpaulin covering a section of the Roman London Wall, known as ‘Bastion 14′, which sits directly underneath the museum’s Roman gallery.

This was to allow the Museum of London Archaeology’s Geomatics Team and Standing Buildings Team to work on the structure whilst Nimbus Conservation carried out conservation works.

The two teams of archaeologists worked together in order to produce detailed elevations of the structure showing the different types of building materials and the existing features. Documentary research into the Bastion’s history was also undertaken using the City of London’s records held at the London Metropolitan Archive.

The comparison between the archival information and the observation of the fabric will lead to the reconstruction of the history of the remains of the bastion and identification of a sequence of development phases.

There is a wealth of information on their work available on the Museum of London Archaeology website here.

Here, Jane Sidell, English Heritage’s (external link) Inspector of Ancient Monuments for London, helps us uncover what was happening underneath:

Bastion 14 has been gradually decaying since the last conservation works over a decade ago. Unfortunately, historic buildings when exposed to the elements tend to deteriorate and consequently require on-going light maintenance. Owing to its deterioration, through weathering, frost-shattering and vegetation growth, the bastion was identified as vulnerable and was placed on the English Heritage, Scheduled Monuments at Risk Register.

A plan and programme of conservation was devised following a condition survey and the work was undertaken by Nimbus Conservation.

The conservation works aimed to secure structural stability, re-point the masonry where needed, using traditional lime mortars, reversing some elements of unsympathetic repairs undertaken in the past.

The excellent work undertaken really shows much more clearly how the bastion would have functioned as a defensive feature before being gradually overwritten by later buildings such as the warehouses and workshops known in the vicinity.

The conservation programme was commissioned through the City Surveyors Department at the City of London Corporation who very generously funded the project.

In advance of our Gladiator Games this July and with the kind permisssion of the publisher, The History Press, we are able to share with you extracts from the book “The World of the Gladiator” by author Susanna Shadrake. Who is also an historical adviser for our gladiator reinactors Britannia who are competing at our games.

Susanna’s book provides us with insight and context for both the preparations and the nature of the combat you can experience over the two days of our games taking place on the site of London’s original Roman amphitheatre, now the Guildhall Yard.

The First Amphitheatres

Amphitheatres had already existed outside Rome, in neighbouring Camania, since at least the end of the second century BC, and certainly from around 70 BC, when Pompeii’s amphitheatre was constructed. By the end of the republic, there were already more than 10 amphitheatres in Campania, Lucania and Etruria, with the majority of those in Campania, the main candidate for the origin of the gladiatorial combats, as well as for the amphithetares themselves.

An amphitheatre in the Guildhall Yard

The reign of Domitian coincided with a fresh phase of the London amphitheatre, and by that time the gladiatorial categories and the conventions of the arena were well known. Hundreds of amphitheatres across Europe and North Africa recreated in lesser scale what the Colosseum achieved at Rome.

Seating and tickets: social status set in stone

Contrary to the popularly held belief that the Colosseum was filled with the screaming mob, it is more realistic to assume that seats in this amphitheatre, as in most others, were allocated according to status, and in line with the client system of patronage which ran through every relationship in Rome.

Humbler Romans without family or business connections may have got in to the munera only by paying through the nose for the privilege (some magistrates rented out seats), some tickets undoubtedly filtered down to the lower orders, but not in significant numbers.

Reconstructing the spectacle

The first decision to be made in recreating this kind of spectacle is how far to go in bringing authenticity to an ancient entertainment whose central element was the unavoidably deliberate bloodshed. The decision was taken that the integrity of the original events that occured at the Guildhall in the middle to late first century AD should be respected.

Disclaimers would be necessary to ensure that everyone [is] aware that, although it was not real, we would be seeking a real response.

On the history side of things, the overall time period of the portrayal had to be carefully considered; a British based society such as Britannia would be best placed to recreate the dynamic Flavian period of the late first and early second centuries.

Despite the less forgiving climate of Britain compared to Rome or its Mediterranean environs, the indications are that the climate was slightly warmer, so wherever possible the principle of exposed flesh and partial armouring [are] retained to re-inforce the image of the gladiator.

All extracts (c) The History Press / Susanna Shadrake.

The World of the Gladiator (ISBN 978-0-7524-3442-1) by Susanna Shadrake is published by the History Press and is available from the Museum’s Shop.

Uncover more background on the upcoming Gladiator Games via our previous blog updates here.

Did you know about the particle detector labs hidden deep down in one of London’s “central” tube stations or the famous landmark that was originally built to double up as a site to observe the heavens? Find out with “London Science Uncovered”, the new location based game for London!

The Museum of London Learning Department has teamed up with the Institute of Physics (external link) to take you on a tour of some of London’s famous and lesser known places of scientific discovery. A brand new smartphone game will guide you around the city, giving you activities and photo opportunities along the way.

Take a new view of the city and uncover the fascinating stories behind the places you wander past each day. The trail will take you around central London and will be a great way to fill a lunchtime or a summer’s day.

To enjoy the tour, you will need a smartphone, either an iPhone or Android phone with an internet connection, and the free SCVNGR (external link) app available from iTunes (external link) and the Google App Store (external link). Simply login to the app, choose treks and then search for “London Science Uncovered”.

Once you’ve completed the trail, answered the questions and snapped your photos, come along to the Museum of London. Show your phone and congratulations message to the Museum’s hosts at the entrance desk to claim your goodie bag of prizes!

We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions too, so send us a message:

aflowers@museumoflondon.org.uk

Blog author: Alex Flowers, Project Coordinator (Digital Learning)