How to Carefully Construct a Hospital over a Roman Boat in Central London, UK

Abstract

This paper examines the Roman boat, buried beneath Guys Hospital in London, UK. A small part was discovered in 1958, and has been carefully left free of disturbance since that date. In 2009, a proposal was made to construct a 14-storey building above the boat; clearly raising challenges for preservation, not to mention the philosophy of burying or excavating and entire ancient monument. A trial pit was opened to see if any remains of the boat survived and uncovered well-preserved timber planks and nails preserved five metres below ground level. Consequently, archaeologists worked closely with the entire design team, determined that more was required than the usual scheme of preserving and monitoring the boat. A legal agreement was secured, making this one of the few projects in the world to have a clearly structured and enforceable plan, if the monitoring data show demonstrable deterioration.

Keywords:

• Guys Hospital
• Roman boat
• Historic England
• NHS Trust
• monitoring
• legal agreement
• redox potential

Acknowledgements

A great many people have been deeply engaged in making this project successful. First, the Guys and St Thomas NHS Trust, particularly Deirdre Conn and Sally Laban; also Chris Constable, the Southwark Senior Archaeology Officer; Derek Seeley, the Project Manager for Museum of London Archaeology; Bruce Watson, formerly of Museum of London Archaeology, who supervised the fieldwork; Vincent Van Walt for design of the monitoring scheme, instrumentation, and training; Mark Swain, SLR Consulting for the drilling; and of course, Peter Marsden for finding the boat and continued support and insight.