The working life of Museum of London

The penultimate week of our  4th volunteer project.

Keeping on track of things, we made steady progress this week, with a bit of work on pottery on Monday as our attempt to finish the boxes of pot from London Docks (LD74) continues. Interesting ceramics such as fancy decorated Tin Glazed ware and Angry faced Bartmann Jars were amongst the hundreds of sherds our hard working volunteers repacked.

Our second current aim – to finish the registered finds from Seal House (SH74) also progressed nicely on Tuesday, when volunteers checked all the ceramic accessioned finds from the site, including over a hundred tiles that made up a Medieval floor. This was followed in the afternoon by checking through the site’s general leather finds, namely post medieval shoe fragments, waste fragments and offcuts. Despite the sound of this, some spectacular bits cropped up including an extremly rare example of a piece of waste leather that was never properly cleaned when first used around 500 years ago. Tuffs of animal hair still remain on the piece of leather.(see above photo) Incredible!

Wednesday’s U3A team finished off their powerpoints for next week’s presentations and the effort they have put in is second to none. Next Wednesday looks set to be a fab morning as they present topics including War time gardens, the impact of bombs and the crows in Shoreditch Park!

Thursday’s lack of volunteers gave Adam & Glynn an opportunity to catch up on some reboxing and get closer to finding out just how much extra space VIP4 has produced.

In next week’s final week we shall be seeing if we can achieve those targets and finish the London Docks pottery and Seal House finds, before spending the afternoons seeing behind the scenes at the Museum of London itself.