Digging for gravel and archaeology
Contents
- Quarrying and the landscape
- Archaeological rescue work in East London
- The Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund
- Making more of the archaeology of East London
Quarrying and the landscape
People have needed gravel and stone for thousands of years, beginning in the early Palaeolithic when they made handaxes and other tools from local flint taken from the Thames terraces and dug as nodules from the chalk outcrops around Purfleet.
Handaxes are often found by quarrymen during mineral extraction. For thousands of years people knapped an impressive range of tools from flint, some items beautiful in their own right. By the end of the Bronze Age their needs had changed and the range of tools became smaller and less attractive.
The earliest recorded gravel pits in the area are in the Dagenham Corridor with extraction tending to move eastwards over time. Much of the area around Old Church, Romford, was dug away in the 19th century. It is only in the later 20th century that centralised records of gravel pits were made by the Greater London Council and local authorities. An attempt is being made in 2004 to create the first definitive map of mineral working in the London Borough of Havering, mainly to record contamination, landfill and related environmental problems.
)
Larger-scale gravel extraction began with the rise of road building in the 18th century and for a long time quarries were hand-dug. After World War II gravel extraction increased up until the 1990s when less land remained available to quarry. By the late 1970s mineral companies were extracting deposits that were ignored in the 1950s and 1960s, needing to supply the increase in house-building and big road-construction schemes such as the M25. Machines such as draglines, box scrapers and larger trucks, allowed huge areas to be quarried in just a few years. Archaeologists then had to record hundreds of acres/hectares.
By the 1970s much of the gravel terraces in south Havering and around Thurrock were characterized by quarries left open or badly filled in, ugly tips and landfill sites for London's rubbish. Badly restored land, usually unsuitable for agriculture, became derelict or rough grazing for ponies and sometimes cattle.
A few companies led the way from the 1960s onwards in restoring the land back to agriculture - for example at Bush Farm. Other sites have since been reinstated as small reservoirs or lakes for leisure and wildlife use. With the setting up of Thames Chase Community Forest more land has been restored, hedgerows replanted and the first trees planted on restored land creating new woodland in what is now a successful experiment.
Archaeological rescue work in East London
)
At first archaeological finds from gravel pits were reported to or given to local collectors, antiquarians and museums, some even as far away as Colchester.
Frank Lewis and Frank Poole, of Rainham and Upminster respectively, recorded finds from local sites, as did John O'Leary, librarian at Dagenham. Many spectacular finds belong to the era of hand-digging, such as the Roman stone coffin at Marks Gate, Dagenham, and the magnificent pagan Saxon burials with glass drinking horns from Gerpins Pit, Rainham in 1937.
Ken Marshall of the Passmore Edwards Museum and members of the Hornchurch and District Historical Society carried out the first archaeological excavations on a prehistoric and Roman site at Corbets Tey (Bush Farm Pit) in 1962. The following year, working from the first archaeological airphotographs of the area taken by St Joseph, Dr Isobel Smith and D Simpson started excavations at Great Arnolds Field, Launders Lane, Rainham. So began more than 40 years of archaeological excavation in advance of the gravel quarrying. Many of these sites were excavated by staff of the Passmore Edwards Museum aided by local volunteers and diggers from Mucking.
Funding for the sites described on this site came from a variety of sources and much of the work would have been impossible without the aid of local volunteers. Senior quarry managers could be very helpful, although not all site foremen were of the same mind. In this and other difficult circumstances the archaeologists needed all the support they could get from the box scraper drivers and dragline operators, without whom some good archaeology on several of these sites would not have been recorded. A number of colourful characters have helped by doing that little bit extra for the archaeologists, from soil moving and avoiding archaeology to sharing their site huts.
Over the decades many farmers have supported archaeologists, providing storage, accommodation, local information and even airphotographs. Their interest and enthusiasm for archaeological sites on their land was always encouraging.
The Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund
The Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund (ALSF) was introduced in April 2002, initially as a two-year pilot scheme, to provide funds to tackle a wide range of problems in areas affected by the extraction of aggregates. Following the Mid-term Evaluation of the pilot scheme the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced a three-year extension to the ALSF in the pre-Budget Statement on 10 December 2003.
Please see the following web pages for further information on the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund:
Making more of the archaeology of East London
It is important that the academic research summarised here is not divorced from the modern landscape and its people.
Proposals for further work currently under consideration include a range of options for involving local residents and visitors in the programme of work and providing better information about the ancient landscapes that are found here. It is hoped that future analysis and publication work will contribute to the updating of this website and other community initiatives.
If you have ideas, comments and suggestions about the text presented here, or about the ways in which the archaeology of East London could be better presented to the local community, please let us know.
Contact address: kcollins@museumoflondon.org.uk