The working life of Museum of London

LAARC of Leather

For the third week of our project we turned our heads towards our leather collections and started our third target – making space in the leather store. Each afternoon volunteers got to handle and audit shoes, scabbards and the like after a morning working with pottery.

Monday’s team found themselves slightly down in numbers this week, but even so managed to complete a significant amount of pottery from the St Thomas St. site (1STS74). They continued where Saturday’s volunteers left off and got to look at some brilliant complete and reconstructed roman vessels.

In the afternoon, they moved from Glynn’s General Finds Project, to Adam’s Registered Finds strand and started by completing the coins from the General Post Office site (GPO75) left over from last week. Once complete, it was time to tackle some leather and the first site worked on was the rather nice material from Billingsgate (BWB83). Finds included many examples of shoes but it was a decorated scabbard (see above photo) that stood out as one of our objects of the week.

Wednesday’s group from Capital Arts continued with leather moving on to another large assemblage from the former City of London Boy’s School, Tudor St. (BOY86). Again, some remarkable shoes and scabbards turned up, however an unidentified decorated piece of leather really caught our attention. What it originally was is still unclear. Click on the photo for a closer look and feel free to leave your opinion as a comment.

The Young Archaeologists joined us on Wednesday afternoon to complete the leather from the same site (BOY86) and they too saw shoes, straps, scabbards and even a glove. Included amongst these was a medieval shoe that had all the pieces needed for it to be reconstructed. With this in mind, the YACs had a go at making their own replica medieval boot out of felt.

Both groups continued to record their session with video and photos provided by our colleagues in e-learning.

Friday’s team, like Monday’s, started with General Finds and the pottery from St. Thomas St (1STS74). Only a third of the pottery boxes left now until the site is done. They too worked on leather in the afternoon, completing two sites; Dowgate Hill House (DGH86) & Sun Wharf, (SUN86) both on Upper Thames Street

To start each day, Glynn showed the teams some of the records archive for the St Thomas St. site, putting things into context. To finish, and quite conveniently in line with the material they’d been working on, the days were completed by a leather finds workshop run by Museum of London curator Jackie Keily.

The project is moving along nicely. To view more pictures, visit our Flickr site, by clicking on any photo or the word Flickr. Roll on week 4