Large-scale archaeological excavations in advance of redevelopment are now rare occurrences in most English cities, but London, as in so many things, is the exception. The project at Plantation Place was just one of a series transforming knowledge of Roman London, particularly in its formative first decades. The site extended over almost 1 ha, though much had been destroyed by the deep basements and pilings of twentieth-century buildings. Pre-Boudican occupation was intensive; the two streets which ran through the excavated area were lined with strip houses and larger, multi-roomed buildings of clay and timber or of mud brick.
It is the activities in the next period that add a new chapter to the history of Roman London. Following the destruction of the early town in the Boudican revolt, in c. a.d. 63 a military base was established on a site east of the river crossing; it was not demolished until c. a.d. 85, though the scale of occupation seems to have been much reduced in the preceding decade. The base was enclosed by a timber-laced rampart fronted by two ditches. The internal buildings, all of timber, included a small granary (a horreum, not horrea as in the text), cook-house and latrine, and there were other small buildings too fragmentary to identify. Only parts of the north and east sides of the defences were seen, but the authors present reasonable, though far from conclusive, arguments for a fort with an area of c. 1.03 ha (2.53 acres) within the ramparts. The difficulty is that there were no barracks; instead, large areas of the interior seem to have been open spaces. The explanation advanced for this departure from the conventional planning of forts is that the soldiers were accommodated in tents alongside more permanent buildings. Despite the obvious objection that such an arrangement is not known at forts elsewhere, its context, near the centre of a large town that was rising anew from its ashes, was exceptional: some form of transit camp cannot be ruled out. Another possibility which the authors do not explore is that the ramparts formed an annexe to a fort of conventional type which was situated beyond the excavations, probably to the west rather than to the south where the ground slopes down to the Thames. Common though annexes are at later first-century forts, few have been excavated and their function is an open question; later examples certainly served a variety of purposes, including the defence of military vici, and the annexe at Bainbridge also contained a stone-built granary.
After the military base was demolished, the original pre-Boudican streets were restored and several large houses, built of clay and timber or of mud brick, lined their frontages. The building plans were fragmentary, indicating little more than their extent, but their interiors were decorated with painted wall-plaster and some of the floors were tessellated or made of wooden planks. All this was swept away following the Hadrianic fire in c. a.d. 125–30. There was then a possible gap in occupation until c. a.d. 150 when a large town-house was built in stone on the north-west part of the site. Apart from a small building to the south-east, the remainder of the site seems to have been an open area until the end of the Roman period. The house had three ranges of rooms and included a cellar, in the floor of which a hoard of 43 aurei, the latest an issue of Marcus Aurelius dated to a.d. 173–4, had been buried. This is one of only five gold hoards known from Britain in the second century and is spectacular testimony to the wealth of the household. The house underwent various alterations and additions, the most remarkable of which was the massive foundation for a tower built at the end of one of the wings. Occupation on the site continued until the end of the fourth century; later levels were removed by modern buildings.
The structural narrative is supported by specialist reports which shed a fitful light on some of the activities on the site. The most ambitious contribution involves an interesting discussion of the pottery, assessing whether the assemblage from the second period can be identified as characteristically military. This is a worthwhile exercise, though one complicated by the uncertain character of the military occupation itself: one might expect major differences between the use of pottery in a regular fort and in a transit camp or a fort annexe.
This volume is a landmark in the study of Roman London for which the authors and all involved in the project are to be congratulated. It is about the twentieth in the MOLA monograph series to be wholly or partly devoted to the Roman period, and, together with reports by other organisations such as PCA, there is now a huge body of published information on the town and its cemeteries. The results of the excavations at Plantation Place are set very ably in their local context, but the reader will inevitably wish to know the wider picture. Surely the time has come for a new Merrifield to write an up-to-date account of the history and archaeology of Roman London.
