Prescot Street, London
Nov 08, 2007 by Lorna Richardson
The site at 41 – 63 Prescot Street is about 3500 square metres in size and lies in the modern London Borough of Tower Hamlets, east of the City of London. The site is being redeveloped during 2008 by Grange Hotels, and L – P : Archaeology are currently excavating the site in advance of construction.
L – P : Archaeology undertook a desk based assessment and extensive field evaluation in 2006. These investigations demonstrated the survival of Roman, Medieval and Post Medieval archaeology on the site as well as two in situ Roman burials. Previous archaeological evaluation and excavation in the area have revealed a substantial number of burials dating to the 1st – 4th centuries AD. The Prescot Street site lies at the centre of what is known as the East London Roman cemetery. This was one of several cemeteries serving the city of Londinium and it’s suburbs. It is one of the largest areas of undeveloped land within the area of the cemetery. Since the 2008 excavation started, a number of burials have been excavated that confirm the results of previous work in the area.
The excavation of the site at Prescot Street started in March 2008. A project website dedicated to the excavation and site at Prescot Street has been created by L – P : Archaeology, so that people from all backgrounds and levels of knowledge can find out more about the dig and follow our progress as we investigate.
The site is powered by L – P : Archaeology’s ARK which provides a web based interface for both the public users of the site and the site administrators. ARK provides a variety of features out of the box which are key to the Prescot Street project including tight integration of spatial data, sophisticated free text searching mechanisms and web services.
The Prescot Street web site is updated weekly, with reports on activities on site, photographs, videos, new finds and a regular ‘journal’ section from the staff involved in the investigation of a very interesting part of East London’s past. This site is home for all the publicly available material about our project. This innovative and exciting web site project has something for everyone – school children and the local community, to academics and archaeologists.
Visit the website to read more.
| Client: | Grange Hotels |
| Site: | 41 – 63 Prescot Street |
| Development type: | Luxury Hotel |