Newham Museum Archaeology Project Archives
Newham Museum Service, 2000. https://doi.org/10.5284/1000328. How to cite using this DOI
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London Borough of Redbridge
Lynton House
255 - 259 High Road
Ilford, Essex
IG1 1NN
England
Resource identifiers
- ADS Collection: 265
- DOI:https://doi.org/10.5284/1000328
- How to cite using this DOI
Amberley House (BA-IE 90)
[File last modified 17th March 1997]
Site Summary
Site Location: TQ 4395/8385
The site is in the Barking Retail Park which is bounded in the north by The London Road, in the West by The River Roding, in the south by The Town Quay and Highbridge Road and in the east by Abbey Road. BA-IE 90 itself lies to the west of the Abbey Road, twenty metres to the south of BA-I 85, now occupied by Comet Retail warehouse, and to the east of the Tempo and Carpetright retail warehouses.
Landowners
The Barking Retail Park was created by Estates and Agency Holdings PLC from land which comprised a number of factory Units but which had become redundant and derelict. At the time of the 1990 excavations MFI, Do It All, Halfords and Carpetright were already trading whilst the Tempo Electrical Retail warehouse was being created from part of the Carpetright warehouse.
Estates and Agency Holdings applied for and gained planning permission to build a new retail warehouse on land which had remained open since the excavation of BA-I 85. A planning clause made planning permission conditional upon the prior investigation of the site by The Passmore Edwards Museum (later Newham Museum Service).
Site Funding
The site was funded by the landowners, Estates and Agency Holdings PLC. Initially, funding was granted for a fixed period and the site ran from Monday, 22nd January, to the end of April. However, an extension was granted to the end of May, 1990.
The Site Recording and Methodology
The site recording method was the Harris Matrix Single Planning System as modified and developed by the Museum of London. All staff understood this method at the outset of the excavation.
Background
In 1910 Alfred (later Sir Alfred) Clapham was asked by The Morant Society and The Barking Urban District Council to archaeologically investigate the Abbey area in advance of the creation of a park, a road and a factory. Clapham's plans show the main drain joined by a subsidiary drain of the medieval Abbey found opposite the west door of the Abbey, largely within the site of what became the Masters Match Factory. Clapham, however, claimed not to have found any evidence for Saxon occupation on his site. The demolition of the Match Factory and construction of a retail warehouse afforded an opportunity to investigate and re-examine the drains and to check Clapham's claims.
The ensuing site revealed perimeter walls, a garderobe and subsidiary drains of the medieval period and a probable head race to a horizontal mill, plans of a number of building and a large number of finds including glass, styli and gold thread.
However, the excavation of trench 4 and trench 5 on the east and south of the future BA-IE 90 revealed a cellar or wardrobe and a large robbed out wall of the medieval period and pits containing small finds of bronze and debrie from a possible glass kiln of the Saxon period.
When this site came up for re-development it was, therefore, decided to ask the Planning Committee of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham to place a planning condition on the development requiring archaeological investigation in advance of development.
The Site
The site began on Monday, 22nd January, and ran until the 19th September, 1990. The main excavation had finished well before September, 1990, but removal of the dumped material around the possible kiln by 1m square spits meant that the work continued until September for a small number of excavators until this area was bottomed and no further features were found.
The Trench
The trench was rectangular in shape and approximately 40m long and 30m wide aligned north/south. The eastern limit of excavation of this site lay along the Abbey Road as Trench 4 of the BA-I 85 investigation was re-excavated and incorporated into the new site.
Recording
The site recording system was based upon the modified Harris Matrix single context planning method operated by The Museum of London Archaeological Service (MOLAS). The site was gridded into 5m squares with the northings numbered from 0 - 40 and the eastings 100-130 so that each grid had a unique SW co-ordinate. Each of these squares was given a Roman numeral and plans made within the grid squares were numbered sequentially.
The Archaeology
Medieval
As explained above, the area of BA-IE 90 fell within the development area of which the BAI-85 excavation was a part. This area was only investigated by evaluation trenches because no further building proposals then existed. In trench 4 on the east of the site was a stone built cellar or wardrobe and a sequence of Saxon pits, one of which contained Roman Tile coated in glass. The tile was interpreted by Professor Vera Evison as having formed part of a tank in which glass was melted. Trench 5 in the south of the site revealed evidence of pits heavily contaminated with charcoal whilst to the west in the centre of the trench was found a substantial robbed out medieval wall. Trench 5 remained outside the southern limits of the 1990 excavation.
The research design called for the clearing of Trench 4, checking the recording of the features in trench 4, and the breaking out of the concrete slab in an area aproximately forty meters long and thirty meters wide.
Removal of the concrete revealed two things. Firstly, it confirmed that the geology of the site was similar to that of BA-I 85 in that, in the east of the site, natural sand and gravel lay almost immediately under the concrete slab. Secondly, it revealed the full extent of the Saxon pits and stone built cellar found in the 1985 evaluation. The cellar was oblong in plan shape and aligned east-west. The walls, of roughly squared ragstone blocks were equally randomly coursed. They were approximately half-a-meter thick and survived to a depth of one-and-a-half meters. A gap in the southern wall carried evidence of a wooden stair down into the cellar the floor of which was the natural gravel.
To the west of the cellar was evidence of a building to which it was probably associated. The southern wall aligned east/west and the eastern wall aligned north/south remained and were composed of ragstone, chalk and flint and were around twenty centimetres high, twenty five centimetres thick and ran approximately five meters west and north. The western wall was probably removed by a 20th century factory wall whilst the northern wall was probably removed during factory construction. These foundations, as explained above, were heavily truncated and it is therefore, not possible to state whether these foundations would have carried a wall of masonry or brick or whether the foundations would have been dwarf walls carrying the sleeper beams of a timber framed structure. The building contained two pitched tile hearths in a poor state of repair which, as in the example in BA-AR 88, was surrounded by window cane, and had clearly last been used to melt lead. Removal of these hearths and floors revealed the east/west aligned northern and southern beam slots of an earlier timber framed structure of approximately the same size. This time the western and eastern walls were absent, the former probably by a factory wall and the latter by the stone built wardrobe.
Running down the western edge of the site from the northern limit of excavation to the southern limit of excavation, a distance of around forty meters was a chalk wall footing one meter wide and one meter deep. The southern five meters of this footing had been robbed out and back-filled with rubble. A semi-circular chalk wall footing with walls half-a-meter thick and measuring approximately two meters north/south and east west extended to the west of the wall at this point. To the east of the wall was a square of mortar and chalk which may have been the foundation for a flying staircase allowing access to the wall. Subsequent removal of the ground north of this feature revealed the partially robbed out remains of an earlier structure. It is quite clear that the construction of the concrete factory floor had, as in BAI 85, removed archaeology of an unknown nature. Valence House Museum has a collection of the plans and elevations of the buildings erected on this site, which show the original ground contours and levels. It would, therefore, be possible to calculate how much ground was removed from the site.
Saxon
The modern feature which cut the earlier building was a substantial structure comprising two brick walls running parallel to and one meter apart from each other and mounted on a thick concrete foundation which would have acted as a passage way between them. These walls and raft survived to a height of around half-a-meter and ran the length of the site from the northern to the southern limits of excavation. Removal of the brick walls created a sectional view of the archaeology.
In this section, in the northern quarter of the site in the western section was revealed a hint of the most important feature of the excavation; a deep, bright orange layer of heavily burnt clay with one area baked almost as hard as ceramic. The archaeological removal of the layers above these surfaces revealed an industrial zone comprising two distinct heavily burnt areas, later thought to be kilns. A large area of rake out was located to the west and south west of this heavily baked layer and to the north, four meters away, lay a semi-circular beam slot surrounded a hearth of pitched Roman Tile.
The Finds
The finds were of medieval and Saxon date.
| Medieval Finds: | Pottery |
|---|---|
| Tile | |
| Bone | |
| Saxon Finds: | Vessel Glass |
| Millifiori Rods | |
| Reticella | |
| Bone comb | |
| Pottery | |
| Slag | |
| Roman Tile | |
| Samples: The AML has decided that it will not be worth analysing these. | |
| Registers Registers exist for: |
Context Sheets |
| Plans | |
| Finds | |
| Sections | |
| Photographs | |
| Small Finds | |
| Matrix | |
Interpretation
The first baked surface to be found may have been the working area around the stokehold of an earlier kiln for cutting it was found the almost intact base of a Saxon kiln, possibly used to melt glass. The base was a circular dish shape paved with pieces of neatly laid Roman Tile. This base was surrounded by a twenty centimetre thick wall which had survived to a height of around thirty centimetres. A groove in the southern wall may have housed the tweyer which carried the bellows nozzle. The base was surrounded by alternating layers of ash and fire-reddened rake out material to a depth of around three-quarters of a meter. The rake out material had been mixed with river rolled pebbles, many of which appeared to have been heat crazed.
The base of the kiln did not contain any evidence of glass and this appears to be a common feature in excavated examples of both Roman and medieval glass kilns. This is possibly due to the method of construction of glass kilns which has remained relatively constant from the Roman period until very recent times. A glass kiln would have three requirements. Firstly, a source of heat, secondly an area to heat and work glass and thirdly a heated area where glass vessels would be allowed to cool slowly. A glass kiln might, therefore, have either three stages with the heat at the base, a glass working tank above it and an annealing or cooling chamber above that, or, the annealing stage might be completely separate with its own heat source underneath it or it might be added to the base, taking residual heat from the stoke-hold. Broken glass might then, be expected to occur in the second stage or in the annealing chamber or in the lining material removed from these latter chambers when they are periodically re-furbished. A second reason why little glass might be found is that glass wasters and broken vessels, unlike pottery vessels, can be re-used as cullet. Examination of the rake-out and possible lining samples may contain glass and thereby prove that this was a glass kiln.
The clay underlying the Roman Tile base was dated by archaeo-magnetism to AD 925 with a plus or minus of fifty years with a sixty six per cent confidence rating. This gives a date range of between AD 825 to AD 1025 which covers a period from the suspected abandonment of the Abbey to beyond the point of its refoundation. The kiln might, therefore, have been used by the Saxons before the abandonment of the Abbey, by the Danes during its abandonment, by the Saxons during its re-foundation, or for subsequent repairs, or it may have been a private workshop during any of these periods. During this period a wood ash modifier was used in the making of glass and the melting temperature of this type of glass is known. It would be useful, therefore, if the firing temperature of a block of clay from the base of the kiln and the re-firing temperature of the Roman Tile could be discovered.
The only other source of evidence for the function of this kiln might be found in associated pits. Unfortunately, the modern walls removed all stratigraphic evidence to connect the pits to the kiln. Examination of the pits produced further evidence for glass working. This included a twyer, a large crucible fragment, a possible ingot of glass, glass slag, numbers of pieces of glass coated Roman Tile and a small number of pieces of vessel glass. The most exciting finds were the large number of pieces of reticule and millifiori and particularly the pieces which proved that this material was being made on the site.
At the moment it is only possible to say that glass is being worked and not that it is being made on the site. To prove that glass was being made on the site it would have been necessary to find frit, that it, the glass at the stage at which the silica sand becomes glass. During this excavation it was thought that if this were a Saxon period glass kiln it would be only the third known in Western Europe. However, at the time Dr.Richard Hodges was excavating a similar period glass kiln at San Vincenza-al-Torno, in Italy. It might be useful to compare the techniques found on these sites. Whilst this excavation has found much evidence of Saxon activity it is not possible to state that either this excavation, or that in 1985, has found evidence of ecclesiastic activity in the Saxon period.
