The Birth of Modern Britain: A Journey into Britain’s Archaeological Past: 1550 to the Present. Francis Pryor

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       IntroductionArchaeology and Modern Times

      BEFORE I GET involved with the ‘meat’ of the book I’d first like to say a few words on the nature of modern historical archaeology in Britain, which is probably the fastest growing branch of the subject. When I started my professional life my team worked with the Peterborough New Town Development Corporation clearing land for factory building. That was back in the early 1970s, long before television programmes like Time Team had managed to convince the public at large that there was such a thing as British archaeology. Too often we would arrive at a site and announce that we’d come to survey and excavate, only to be greeted with incredulous stares and humorous comments to the effect that surely we would be better employed in Egypt, Greece or Italy. Then, when I had shown the builders (and anyone else who happened to be hanging around on site) the air photographs with the ring-ditch evidence for Bronze Age barrows and explained that these were as old as Stonehenge – which in turn was much older than the Parthenon or King Tutankhamun – the scoffing would cease and most of my audience would become our enthusiastic supporters. Sometimes their enthusiasm was such that it was hard to get much work done.

      But just suppose for one moment that we had arrived on site and announced that we were planning to survey and excavate the ramshackle nineteenth- and early twentieth-century farm buildings that were then such a common feature of the city’s eastern fringes. In actual fact, those buildings were rather important, as the Fens, which were drained in the seventeenth century, were once a major producer of food for Britain’s rapidly expanding urban populations. But I very much doubt whether we would have found it quite so straightforward to silence the scoffing, because even in the better-informed times we currently live in, many people suppose that the terms ‘archaeology’ and ‘modern’ are mutually exclusive.

      It’s not unreasonable to assume that a fair amount of time needs to pass before archaeological research becomes possible, let alone desirable, or informative. But, actually, this view is wrong because archaeology is not just about excavation; it’s an approach to the past that can be equally relevant when applied to something as young as a month, or as old as a millennium. Just imagine, for example, that an entire townscape is bombed flat, as happened in Coventry or in large parts of east London. In those cases archaeology is almost the only way to resurrect in any meaningful way what enemy aeroplanes destroyed. Under such circumstances, old pictures and sketches can, of course, be useful, but accurate measurements, made then and there on the ground, will be needed if reconstruction is to be attempted. In postwar years town centre developers did as much damage to Britain’s historic towns and cities as Nazi aircraft, and almost as quickly. Today this would not happen, but in the fifties and sixties pre-development surveys rarely took place. So such peacetime destruction was often horribly complete.

      The simple distinction between archaeology (dirt) and history (documents), although never so clear cut, begins to break down in post-medieval times when documents of every conceivable sort become near-ubiquitous: everything from newspapers to till-roll receipts. And much of this material can find its way into the archaeological record by way of local private archives that can survive for years in abandoned offices and dusty attics. Sometimes, however, archaeologists can reveal new documentary sources that the conventional wisdom believed had long been destroyed. It was the professional and amateur archaeologists working as part of the Council for British Archaeology’s Defence of Britain Project who discovered the paperwork drawn up in 1940 that ordered and duly paid for the building of the many concrete and brick pillboxes and other defences that can still be found in their thousands in unexpected nooks and crannies across Britain.

      The Defence of Britain project shows how very important it is to keep archaeological research and survey up to date, because when it took place (1995–2002) huge numbers of Second World War defences were being destroyed as ‘eyesores’ – their historical importance notwithstanding. Some 20,000 records of military installations were made during those seven years and the most important of these were then given legal protection as Scheduled Ancient Monuments.¹ Without that project it would have been impossible to have drawn up a list of sites worthy of such protection. The same has since been achieved for Cold War sites. Would that something similar had been done before Dr Beeching wielded the axe that amputated the limbs of a once great railway network, whose Victorian stations, bridges and signal boxes now stand mouldering, while local people, stuck in traffic jams, have cause to regret their passing. The past is no less important just because it is recent. The real danger is that we take it for granted, like those wartime structures, because then we won’t realise that it has gone until it’s too late.

      Of course, it’s very easy to take things for granted. Everyone today, even the most rich and powerful people in the land, has to cope with repetition: the daily drive to work or the royal flight; the walk to and from the station; regular trips to the parents-in-law, etc, etc. Each time we take a familiar journey we inevitably attach less and less value to the buildings and places we pass by. Whether we like it or not, familiarity does indeed breed indifference, if not actual contempt. Most people would agree that it is impossible to retain one’s enthusiasm for a building at quite the same level as when one first encountered it. But it doesn’t always have to be like this. In my experience archaeology can help keep one’s surroundings fresh and lively, simply by seeking out the links that tie the different parts of a particular place together.

      Let’s take the case of a provincial town or city where we have a railway station built in the late 1860s, followed by relatively humble housing developments nearby in the early 1870s. By the 1880s streets of somewhat grander, mostly middle-class, villas start to appear, at which point, too, a large red-brick mock-Gothic church was also constructed. In the mid-twentieth century the area became less fashionable as the middle classes moved to new suburbs on the fringes of town. The church was then converted to a sound-recording studio and a new mosque was built on land that had once been railway marshalling yards. I won’t go on, but it’s the tales of development, setback and change, only slightly hidden away in the layout of our towns and villages, that СКАЧАТЬ