Roman glass, 35 Basinghall Street

Clients: Standard Chartered Bank and Stanhope plc

Author: Sophie Jackson

The excavation at 35 Basinghall Street in 2005 produced an outstanding assemblage of Roman glass. It is important because it offers a more-or-less complete sequence of the glass production process in Roman London, including: a large assemblage of cullet (waste glass for recycling), possible imported raw glass in the form of large and irregularly shaped chunks, blocks of material from a failed ‘tank’ of glass, associated production waste (moils from the ends of blowpipes etc) and failed vessels (wasters) from the glass working process.

Several of these features have yet to be reported from any other site in the Roman world, including the evidence for the pre-firing of the cullet (presumably a “cleaning” process to remove organic matter) and the blocks of material from a glass-working (as opposed to glass-making) ‘tank’. Also the chunks of raw glass may provide for the first time direct evidence that some glass was imported into Britain as raw material from the Near East, rather than as cullet from continental Europe.

The site offers an excellent opportunity to understand the stages of the glass working process in the North-West provinces, the far end of the Empire. As it exploited large volumes of cullet, it provides a contrast to recent discoveries in the Near East, where workshops had a ready supply of freshly made raw glass. Work on the glass will be continuing in 2006 as part of the post-excavation assessment and analysis phases for the site record.

This site report is extracted from MoLAS 2005: annual review