London's Waterfront

All four sites, being in the reclamation zone of the north bank of the Thames, found Roman and late Saxon (10th-11th century) waterfronts; reportson these were published on 1986 and 1992. The next stage of the project was to publish an account of the period 1100 to 1666. In 2018 Archaeopress and CoLAT jointly published this large (550-page) monograph, London’s Waterfront 1100-1666: excavations in Thames Street, London, 1974-84 . Below you will find a link to the press release and summary of the monograph. CoLAT is also pleased to host here the complete text as a single PDF file, which can be downloaded free of charge. This is the same as the text on the Open Access page of the Archaeopress website.

Attention then turned to a fourth stage in the project, the analysis and publication of the buildings and artefacts from the four sites in the period after the Great Fire, that is from 1666 to 1800. This was when the port of London began to be the organisational hub of the new British Empire. Funds were awarded to the project by CoLAT in 2019 to finish the necessary post-excavation assessment of the sites for this period. The project is called London’s Waterfront 1666 to 1800  and is directed by John Schofield. For a free copy of the whole text in PDF format, see below in the Documents and Video section. This is the same text as available on the Archaeopress website.

You are welcome to download any of these files. If you wish to use any of them in your work, please contact John Schofield to ask permission and to get the method of citing the report correct. The project authors are happy to discuss anything emerging from the current work with colleagues. Further, we encourage students of any kind, and their supervisors, to consider conducting research on this material, perhaps on a small group of finds, pottery, or strata (contexts).