Channel 4 UK TV Time Team Special

[Peter Clare]

Buried by the Blitz: A Time Team Special

Sunday 29-10-06 6:40pm - 7:40pm

Shoreditch Park is a welcome green oasis on the northern edge of the City of London. Most people who use it today have no idea that under the grass lies the physical evidence of an extraordinary story – the story of Britain's darkest and, in the words of Winston Churchill, finest hour.

At the beginning of the 1940s, the area now covered by the park was crammed with terraced houses. And between 7 September 1940, when the Nazis' aerial blitz on London began, and 11 May 1941, when it reached its bloody climax, the sky was swarming with German bombers. The consequences for the people who lived in these terraces were catastrophic. By the time the bombing was over, barely a single house had escaped being damaged; many were completely destroyed.

In the summer of 2005, and again for a shorter period in 2006, archaeologists from the Museum of London carried out a pioneering 'community excavation' to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. They were searching for what was left of some of the houses that once stood on the site.

The excavation was pioneering in two senses. First, its target was the sort of ordinary 19th and 20th century remains that archaeologists normally dig through to get to the older layers underneath. (Martin Brown, one of the archaeologists working on the project, said he was aware of only one other archaeological excavation that has looked at housing bombed during the Second World War.) And second, the dig aimed to involve as many people as possible from the local community, including past and present residents, in exploring buried aspects of their own recent history.

Time Team was present to film the excavation and the finds, to help to uncover the history of the area and to talk to some of the hundreds of people – both young and old – who played a part in this unique archaeological project.