I have been away on a kind of working holiday recently and returned on the 4th of April to Presot Street. I, therefore, missed the first 2 weeks of excavation and roughly a third of the first area had already been opened. Several large pits, soak-aways and wells had already been excavated revealing fairly deep dump and make-up deposits.

Since then, the rest of the first area has been reduced although much of it needs to be cleaned and investigated in greater detail. We’re going to need more staff to get this under way at any speed (which with all contract archaeology is the essence), however. At the moment we’re basically looking at a number of early to late post-medieval cut features, limited architecture and dump deposits.

I’ve been doing a little bit of filming to put together and kind of video diary project which I’ll try and start editing together to get it up on-line in a week or two. There have been very different reactions from people when I stuck the camera in their face and there was a general reluctance to say anything on film. Hopefully this will change as people become more relaxed with the idea and feel generally more confident to make any comments about the archaeology. Plus, at the moment, there isn’t really too much to say about the site as it’s only really just started. We’re thinking that we will stream these short films (5 to 10 minutes long) from YouTube and this will hopefully give people that are interested (both of them) a bit more of a visual insight in to what is going on on this site and what contract archaeology in central London can entail.