‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’
Ian Blair
Sunday 4th December 2022 saw the closure of the Museum of London after a tenure of forty-five years, having first opened its doors at London Wall in December 1976: to mark the event, the Museum threw ‘The Great Museum of London Reunion’ aimed at bringing together all staff, past and present, to celebrate the museum and its achievements: a new museum is scheduled to open in the historic General Market site at West Smithfield in 2026.
The Museum of London looking towards the Barbican. The lower terrace offices once housed the MoLAS Excavations office on the left, with the opposing rooms to the right used for meetings, displays, and the odd social gathering. At one party (held there after the Museum had stopped inviting us to theirs) Paddy McNulty exited through one of the full-length glass windows of the non-opening variety next to the actual door. Fortunately, there was no resultant loss of life!
The final countdown: Flyer advertising ‘The Great Museum of London Reunion’
‘End of an era’: a sad-looking Museum of London shuttered-up and closed for business in January 2023
It was with a degree of trepidation that I stepped inside the Museum foyer at 6.10pm uncertain as to what the evening had in store, and what skeletons from my archaeological past might come rattling out of their cupboards and tap me on my shoulder with their bony fingers, my worst fear being that with the passage of time would I even recognise them?
I was thankful therefore that this scenario did not come to pass, and that with the odd exception, names of the colleagues I had worked with across more than four decades of London archaeology flowed freely back into my mind. It was really gratifying that so many archaeologists I had worked alongside over the years were present, which ironically meant that it took me over an hour and a quarter to move through the Museum foyer and finally reach the rear staircase leading down to the bar downstairs. In doing so, I recorded the slowest time ever for an archaeologist to have a drink in his hand when there was a free-bar on the premises.
Predictably it was in the basement close to the source of alcohol that most people were gathered, and by the time I finally joined them the disco had also fired up, with spangly Disco Dancing DJ Anna Greenwood at the helm, providing a more than slightly surreal psychedelic backdrop to the proceedings. https://vimeo.com/191034672
It was fantastic to find that several of my predecessors in post when I joined the Department of Urban Archaeology and Hobley’s Heroes in January 1978 were also in attendance, many of whom I had not seen in half a lifetime. Familiar faces included: John Burke-Easton, Kevin & Julie Flude, Derek Gadd, Chrissie Harrison, Paul Herbert, Mike Lee, Louise Miller (Malkin), Gustav Milne, Mike Rhodes, and Natalie Tobert: who coincidentally had started on the same day as me.
Perhaps the biggest surprise for me, however, was the large number of archaeologists who I had worked with on a comparatively small site at Gutter Lane (ABC87) in 1987-88, who had clearly found out about the reunion on the archaeological grapevine and had shown up en masse. These included: Barry Bishop, Kim Cronk, Shahina Farid, Sean O’Connor, Vicky Ridgeway, Mark Wiggins, and conservator Dana Goodburn-Brown. The full list of staff on site is shown on the weekly staff deployment sheet dated 11th February 1988, which also illustrates the large number of on-going DUA sites in the City of London at that time and the archaeologists thereon.
DUA staff deployment sheet dated 11th February 1988, all the archaeologists who feature long since scattered to the four winds
Two years later, all this was to change with the mass cull of archaeologists and ensuing redundancies: the last DUA Newsletter to roll off the printing press dated October 1990, has the writing writ firmly on the wall with the introductory ‘Staff News’ listing ‘10 Layoffs’ and ‘37 Redundancies’, many others were soon to follow, the good ship DUA only having lifeboats for three-quarters of the crew members. https://digginglondon.org.uk/images/DUA-pdfs/DUA_25_Oct90.pdf
All the sites that I worked on for the DUA and onward into the MoLAS and MOLA decades hold colourful memories for me, as do the fantastic archaeologists who I was privileged to work alongside. I previously wrote a short post about Gutter Lane which I have now updated and expanded in: ‘Inflated view from a balloon over Gutter Lane’: this details a climb that a good number of us made up the tower crane on site at the end of the excavation, and fittingly given the party theme of this post entailed an awful lot of balloons.
Red balloon fluttering from the tower crane on Gutter Lane, three of the archaeologists can be seen far below on Terra Firma
** Title of post borrowed from Oscar Wilde, ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’
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