What Lurks Beneath

Surprising what you can dig up under London

It was recently revealed that a skeleton found under St-Martin-Fields, just off Trafalgar Square, has prompted a re-think of London's history. This discovery has got the men with mud under the nails quite excited and historians reaching for their books for a re-draft.

The old church has got the builders in as part of a £36 million facelift. The workmen, digging down, uncovered an old looking box and, to their surprise, found a headless skeleton inside with a few fingers missing.

This sort of discovery is fascinating for people who like to study things that have been buried for a long time. The sort of people who take a metal detector out on Salisbury Plain on the weekends - for fun. For them, this is like finding a bar of gold. After 1,500 years under ground, the box of old bones is said to reveal new and previously unknown information about our city.

The discovery of the dead man, thought to be a wealthy Roman, has revealed that Romans remained in London longer than previously thought. Not, it has to be said, by much. The discovery places Romans in London a mere 10 years longer than was previously thought. But, if you look at our most recent decade – under the leadership of Mr Blair – you quickly realise a lot can happen in 10 years.

When you’re dealing with history, every little thing you can dig up helps and this find certainly narrows the gap on what happened to the city after the Romans left and before the Saxons arrived. Even with this significant discovery there's still 190 years we're not really sure about – it's like working with a jigsaw puzzle with more than half the pieces missing. People who've studied this in far more depth than I’ll ever get around to say the city was in decline and went to ruin between 410 and 600 AD. No wonder they're so excited about this finding at St Martin's. The skeleton wasn't the only thing that was unearthed, another grave or two, pots and jewellery were discovered helping them piece together what was going during this sketchy time. It's fascinating stuff.

I often think what would an archaeologist in thousands of years' time make of how we live today. Instead of the remains of a grain-like breakfast in our stomachs they'll find the remnants of a Burger King – because we all know the toxins in those things will never break down. Where today we dig up jewellery and pottery fragments they'll be discovering iPods and computer chips. And instead of living in caves and castles they'll realise we lived in concrete bunkers (if nuclear fears are realised) or high rises made up of cells stacked on top of each other.

If the archaeologists of tomorrow really hit the jackpot they might find the great burial sites of the early 21st century (currently known as land fill sites), filled with plastic bags and naturally though incorrectly deduce that we co-habited, apparently quite amicably, with another species quite different from ourselves and made entirely of plastic.

The Roman skeleton and other findings will be on display at the Museum of London (London Wall, EC2Y 5HN) until 8th August 2007. Opening times: Mon to Sat 10:00 - 17:30, Sun 12:00 - 17:30. Admission free.

Spending a Few Pennies

More parking bays have been provided for our very own cabbies so they can relieve themselves in private. Since realising that taxi drivers often wee in alleyways and side streets because they simply can’t find a place to stop (not in London surely?), Westminster City Council has upped the quota and strategically placed spaces (for 20p) near public loos. I wonder how many council meetings that took.

How to Drive the Housemates Mad

Those crazy kids at Channel 4 just don’t know what to do next to keep ‘Big Brother’ addictive. Seven long summers of the diary room and bonkers housemates (that’s not even mentioning the celebs) have gone by and as the eighth series approaches the powers-that-be are putting the bath in the living room and the fridge in the garden. People, no doubt, will be hooked.

All in the Name of Art

Should we not be proud of our emerging talent in the world of art? At the Royal College of Art Sculpture Show there were such offerings as a ‘torture chamber’ steel bed, a room full of domestic debris and a nine foot structure made out of 2,000 casts of human bones. This last one looked like a giant morbid wedding cake – not sure if that was deliberate but it’s probably all to do with interpretation.

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