‘Inflated view from a balloon over Gutter Lane’
Ian Blair
The group of photos that follow this post were taken on Gutter Lane (ABC87) in 1988, soon after the up to then ‘missing’ amphitheatre had been formally identified on the Guildhall Art Gallery (GAG87) site.
I took the photos after climbing up the site tower crane on our final weekend, so they are essentially a series of panoramic aerial views of the skyline of the City of London at that time. The clock on Saint Paul’s Cathedral, long-since frozen in time, shows it was 6.12pm in the evening. I was not alone in making the long climb, as several of the other archaeologists subsequently followed me, and at one point there were at least four to six of us standing on the gantry on the rear arm of the crane. It goes without saying that we were in sole occupation of the site at the time, which was the reason why our spontaneous site outing took place.
As part of this enterprise I had for reasons unknown thought what a great thing it would be to fill the drivers cab at the top with balloons, which is precisely what we did. Collectively, we spent a good couple of hours on site blowing the things up during our breaks. To get them up to the top of the crane they were hauled up the side of the tower in a net on the end of a very long length of string, and then had to be painstakingly fed one at a time through the trapdoor into the cab. Because the door was in the floor, it was effectively like trying to push the things into an open loft-space above your head, whilst keeping the hatch partially closed to stop them simply floating out again!
To alert ‘Jim’ the crane operator to the fact that something was afoot, we tied a number of balloons to the outside of the tower, which he would have passed on his slow ascent to his place of work on Monday morning. One of these ‘marker’ balloons can be seen fluttering around in the corner of the downward views of the site, which also features three unidentified archaeologists on Terra Firma far below.
In the weeks that followed, the balloons could clearly be seen when you looked up at the crane from the surrounding City streets, as Jim had gathered them together in a big bunch in the back of his cab. Funny old times!
Postscript: After the completion of the Gutter Lane excavation I spent two months working at the Roman City of Nicopolis Ad Istrum in Bulgaria, where I received a letter from conservator Dana Goodburn-Brown dated 18th July 1988. Dana was very much one of the site team and had lifted the Roman mosaic we found on site.
During my absence she had met and spoken to a few of the contractors we had worked with including Jim the crane operator. It seems that the archaeologists were not the only ‘out-of-hours’ visitors to his lofty perch in the sky, as it transpired that subsquently ‘Jim had his ghetto blaster stolen from his crane cab – apparently the City police came round, looked up at the crane, said they didn’t believe him, and left.’
Thirty-five years on: a review of the Gutter Lane photos in 2023
When the aerial views from the top of the tower crane on Gutter Lane were first posted they were not captioned which is something that I have now sought to address. Whilst initially I thought of simply adding a short description and a direction of view, the more I looked at them, the more I was progressively drawn into the detail that the photos contained, and somewhat foolishly decided to try and identify the featured buildings: be they City tower blocks, other smaller recognisable buildings, or simply the projecting spires or towers of hidden City churches. The photos having been taken thirty-five years ago, it was now readily apparent to me just how much the City of London skyline had changed in the intervening years, to the point where large parts of it are now barely recognizable, and buildings that featured have long since vanished, or been given brand new exoskeletons as camouflage.
It is strange to muse that at that time, the Bankside Power Station was simply a redundant power station and not the Tate Modern, and had no ‘wobbly-bridge’ to connect it to the north bank, Paternoster Square was still a soulless concrete jungle and the after-hours playground of archaeologists and their various eclectic sporting endeavours, and the heart of the City was still yet to be decimated by two massive IRA bombs, the first outside the Baltic Exchange in St Mary Axe on Friday 10th April 1992, and a year later on Saturday 24th April 1993, when an even larger truck bomb detonated on Bishopsgate: I remember hearing the blast from my garden in Walthamstow eight miles away. Coincidentally, at that time I was working on David Lakin’s site at 34-5 Great St Helens just off Bishopsgate and MoLAS had also been monitoring test-pits in the small church of ‘St Ethelburga-the-Virgin within Bishopsgate’, which lying as it did only seven metres from the epicentre of the explosion was largely reduced to a pile of rubble in the blast. Unsurprisingly, it was many weeks before we were allowed to go back onto site again.
The pace of development across the City of London has once again increased in recent times, with large parts of the Broadgate Centre, that was still being built when my photos were taken in 1988, now having been demolished, new buildings being constructed, and the site once again being repurposed. Currently there are at least three sites of major DUA excavations being redeveloped: Alan Thompson and Steve Roskams GPO site at Newgate Street (GPO75), Geoff Egan’s Swan Lane (SWA81), and Gustav Milne’s Leadenhall Court (LCT84).
If I was a believer in ‘Conspiracy Theories’, I might surmise that something underhand was afoot on the part of unseen shadowy figures in the Corporation of London, in trying to finally remove all remaining traces of archaeology on these sites. The corollary being that perhaps the real reason for hosting the ‘Great Museum of London Reunion’, was to create a ‘super-spreader’ event using the enticement of a free bar in an attempt to decimate the ranks of the assembled archaeological fraternity: perhaps even a function actioned by Corporation foot-soldiers in response to a disembodied utterance heard from behind a closed door high in the Guildhall: ‘Will no one rid me of these troublesome archaeologists!’.
‘Inflated view from a balloon over Gutter Lane’
The Photos
Ian Blair