eastlondonhistory.com

London, with its two millennia of history, shows only its most recent past on the surface. Dig down a few feet and layer upon layer of buildings are uncovered. It’s an excavation job that the Museum of London and its predecessors have been doing for years – unearthing around 1,000 sites in Greater London. And Tower Hamlets, with its centuries of development as a port and borough hard by the old City walls, has more to reveal than most.

More than 70 historical digs pepper the borough. Most of them are clustered around Aldgate to the west – that’s unsurprising, because for the greater part of our history, Bow, Bromley, Stepney and Mile End were wild countryside. But they lie as far east along the river as the Limehouse Link’s meeting with The Highway – where a 1989 dig recovered many prehistoric ‘worked’ flints and located the remains of a c.18th century factory that produced Limehouse porcelain. This dig revealed the successive layers of industry too, also uncovering older brick buildings engaged in pickling and lime burning.

Roman quarry in Armagh Road

And in the north of the borough, a cluster of digs around Bow reveal treasures from the Roman occupation and later. A 1990 dig in Armagh Road not only uncovered a Roman quarry, supplying the rock for the invaders’ excellent roads, but evidence of ploughsoil – so farming was going on as well.

Many of the digs around the City walls reveal the grim legacy of the waves of plague that hit London from the Middle Ages onward. Digs in Artillery Lane revealed medieval plague pits, though interestingly there were also signs of Roman burials – so the same graveyards had been in use for many centuries.

Indeed, the piling on of layers of use and development can make the archaeologist’s job a brain-bending puzzle. A dig in Back Church Lane, E1, in 1988 revealed traces of Roman features, but the Roman strata had been much damaged by a post-medieval cemetery and more modern buildings. Adding to the confusion, the line of a Roman road cuts across the modern street plan.

Tudor garden in Stepney

Of course the plague and pestilence of medieval Aldgate began to drive people out to the countryside of Stepney and beyond. For those who could afford it, the answer was to build a manor house in what was then the Essex countryside. A dig in Butcher Row, E14, in 1975, revealed not just an ancient chalk-and-flint boundary wall, but three later buildings on top of it. These c17th century buildings were revealed by the remnants of their gravel yards. In another part of the site the archaeologists had to be even more clever – traces of Tudor garden soil betrayed the fact that homes had stood beneath the 18th and 19th century warehouses.

Peeling back the layers on the Butcher Row site reveals a microcosm of how Tower Hamlets has changed – agriculture, supplanted by grand homes, replaced in turn by industry. Perhaps in 500 years, archaeologists will be digging beneath the foundations of Wapping’s luxury flats and finding that wharves and warehouses once stood here.

Some of those Tower Hamlets digs

72a Armagh Rd, E3: 1990 excavation revealing early Roman gravelling, probably for construction of London to Colchester road.
37-39 Artillery Lane, E1: 1976 dig revealed remains of a plague pit.
East Tenter St, Scarborough St, E1: 1988 dig revealed shallow Roman deposits, eight burials (three in chalk) and fragments of a mortared flint structure which may have been part of a mausoleum.
36-44 Gower’s Walk, E1: 1989 dig revealed sandy layer beneath garden soil, dated to 16th century. Structures included a basement, well and cesspit. Also a small part of Dissenters’ burial ground.
Hooper St, E1: 1988 dig revealed extensive Roman cemetery lying alongside a road or track. Numerous burials of adults and children. Goods found included hobnail shoes, shale bracelets, glass beads and a possible jewelled casket. Also half of an inscribed gravestone.
Morville St, E3: Excavation in 1972-73 unearthed a ditch, burial pit and shallow gullies contain Roman pottery of the 1st or 2nd centuries.
Priscilla Rd, E3: 1977 observations recorded a flat-bottomed pit cut into gravel. Above was a layer of ploughsoil.
For more information read ‘Archaeology in Greater London 1965-90: a guide to records of excavation by the Museum of London, edited by Thompson, Westman and Dyson, ISBN 0-904818-80-2

It seems like the streets of the East End get busier every day, as cars, buses, lorries and pedestrians rush frantically about their daily business.
But if London seems busy on the surface, there is another world, a subterranean world we only see glimpses of. As much is going on beneath the streets of the city – and a new edition of a fascinating book scratches away at the London clay to uncover the complex world that lies beneath our feet.
Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman’s London Under London leaves no stone unturned, as the pair look at East Enders being driven underground by the Blitz, the lost and buried rivers of London, the intricate network of water, hydraulic power and gas pipes that feed our city, tunnels under the Thames, underground railways, civil defence… and ‘oddities’.
Many of these oddities are underground systems that have been made redundant by progress and the passage of time – the subterranean tram system proposed by a Royal Commission in the early 1900s but never adopted; the ghost Underground stations, such as St Mary’s Whitechapel, which were left behind by population shifts, ruthless competition, or just rank bad planning; and the disastrous attempts to join east and south London by tunnels under the Thames.
We see the often shambolic progress of Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel – 18 years and several bankruptcies in the construction, it claimed the lives of several workmen and, ultimately, that of the broken Brunel himself.
The tunnel, like many under-London schemes, adapted to the times, becoming first a footway, then the route of the London to Brighton railway, before finally settling into its role as the conduit of the East London Line between Wapping and Rotherhithe.
Of course, much of the tunnelling was essential to protect the life of London as a city. The East End was sinking under a tide of filth and sewage before Joseph Bazalgette built his new sewage system in the 1800s, and we follow the progress of London’s fresh drinking water eastward – in fact only the pipes that run from the River Lea’s reservoirs go against this flow, pumping water westward and back into the East End.

And if you think London is overcrowded today, take a look at Victorian street scenes – if possible, the traffic moves even more slowly. It was in response to this Dickensian gridlock that underground railways were first proposed – boring through the East End soil in the case of the Central Line, but causing much more chaos in the construction with the cut-and-cover District Line and wholesale destruction of streets and houses.
Some tunnelling is more secret than others of course. The book charts the building and appropriation by tunnels of generations of governments, ministries and essential utilities, as they built bolt holes against terrorism, insurrection and nuclear war
And we see how the undermining of London continues into our new century, as ever more traffic competes for a finite amount of space – the Isle of Dogs, already carved to pieces a century or so ago to accommodate the ocean-going goods ships, is now holed beneath the surface too, as the Jubilee Line extension snakes under the borough.

London Under London: a subterranean guide by Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman; published by John Murray ISBN 0719552885; £15.99.