1. Newsletter Spring 2012
Thank you for your interest in the Thames Discovery Programme (TDP)
You may have been a FROG member since the beginning, met us recently at one of our events or
found us online – however you got here, welcome, and we hope you enjoy our newsletter! In this issue
you can find out more about the work of the FROG teams in Bermondsey, Vauxhall, Greenwich,
Custom House, Bankside and in West London and about our forthcoming events. If you have any
questions or would like to find out more about the Thames Discovery Programme, please get in touch:
enquiries@thamesdiscovery.org
SAVE THE DATE—TOWER OF FROG Training - Book Now!
LONDON OPEN FORESHORE!
26-27 May 2012
Join the Thames Discovery Programme,
Historic Royal Palaces, Thames21 and the
City of London Archaeological Society to
explore the foreshore at the Tower of London
Bookings are now open for training to become a
member of the Foreshore Recording and
Observation Group. Our new programme takes
place over four days and includes health and
safety training, lectures about Thames
archaeology from the TDP team, foreshore
fieldwork sessions on some iconic London
beaches and guided walks to sites of
archaeological and historical interest. All this for a
cost of only £25.00 per day!
The Thames Discovery Programme is now
hosted by Museum of London Archaeology! Summer session:
Our contact details are: Mortimer Wheeler Tuesday 19th – Friday 22nd June 2012
House, 46 Eagle Wharf Road, London N1
7ED, Telephone 02074102207. We’re rarely To book your place, please contact TDP Field
in the office so it may be Officer Eliott Wragg. Please note that attendance
easier to contact us via at all four days of the training is required to
email in the first instance. complete the course and become a member of
Also, you can find us on the FROG team.
Facebook and Twitter
@ThamesDiscovery We look forward to seeing you on the
foreshore!
Newsletter contributors: Helen Johnston (Greenwich), Peter Marchant (Custom House), Courtney Nimura
(Bermondsey) and Solange La Rose (Vauxhall and Bankside). Edited by Nathalie Cohen

2. News from the Foreshore Recording
and Observation Group
Vauxhall FROG
The Vauxhall Group may be small, but it’s perfectly-
formed and plucky to boot. Vauxhall has been a rather
challenging site in many ways. We’ve been making
regular visits and been able to see first-hand the rapid
changes going on at the site. In the western half of the
zone, where the Bronze-Age structure is situated,
significant erosion has made access a bit hair-raising at
times, but it is also exposing peat deposits, new
features and flint fragments. This has given the
Vauxhall FROG a chance to improve our flint-flake-
spotting skills. In the eastern half of the site, erosion is
exposing more of the underlying peat and a discrete
concentration of fire-cracked flints. We also seem to
have a couple of little new islands appearing along the
site, which appear to be made of redeposited material.
There’s everything to play for at Vauxhall, as the site is
earmarked for significant disruption as part of Thames
Water’s Tideway Tunnel project but the TDP, with
support from English Heritage and SLAEC, are on the
case!
Photos by Roger Chapman
Bankside FROG
The Bankside Group has been visiting the site
quite regularly over the past 6 months and is now
getting to grips with the complexities of not only the
site itself, but also the original survey, especially as
the area has changed considerably over the past
15 or so years. We’re finding that, as the site is
large and there are lots of structures and features,
we’ve naturally divided it into thirds, rather than
trying to do the whole lot in one go each time.
We’re already noticing changes, with erosion
resulting in the exposure of previously-covered
peat levels, and the deterioration of the bottom of
the main access route, Globe Stairs. There has
also been some deposition with the growth of an
enormous pile of pebbles and allsorts, now known
as ‘The Beast’. There’s lots of ongoing FROGging
to be doing at this site, although this is one that
may be affected by the Jubilee/Olympics
jamborees, so this summer could be a bit tricky.
Photos by Solange La Rose We’ll keep posting photos and updates though.

3. Bermondsey
FROG From left to right: Edna Wolfson, Margaret Sparks, Jeanne
At the Foreshore Lewis, Peter Baistow, Courtney Nimura, Cathy Butler
Forum in September
2011 our group
presented work from
the previous year.
Peter’s segment
Then and Now
showed historical
photographs of the
waterfront and
compared them with
his own over the last
50 years. Jeanne
presented the
Foreshore in
Context and
explained our
methodology for
monitoring and
recording, while
Edna’s Foreshore Forays showed artefacts we’ve found from a Late Iron Age sherd to a discarded Russian
revolver! Margaret finished the talk with History on the Street, taking us further from the site to relevant historical
locations in the Bermondsey vicinity. Altogether we felt the conference was not only informative but a great
opportunity to meet some new FROGs and touch base with those we hadn’t seen since in awhile. In November
we visited the Brunel Museum and Tunnel entrance, which set the tone for our winter research schedule.
We began 2012 with a presentation of historical maps of Bermondsey by our fellow FROG Alan Haigh. Our group
has always been interested in connecting what is happening on the waterfront to the foreshore archaeology, and
we have collected over 10 maps spanning from 1688 to the present day. Reconstructing the history of Chamber’s
Wharf and the surrounds has shed light on a number of features. Some, such as Three Mariners stairs, now only
exist on the historical maps. In March some FROGs attended the Thames Shipbuilding Symposium at the
Museum of London in Docklands. Most recently we met at LAARC to attend a session led by FROG Courtney
Nimura on our new monitoring system. We have spent the winter brainstorming about how we can make the
Feature List user-friendlier for some of our members who feel uncomfortable with computers. We now have a plan
to test this new system throughout the summer as well as record the features under Chamber’s Wharf in greater
detail. With our tide tables and recording plans organised, the field season has officially begun!
West London FROG
The group has been
busy visiting key sites
across West London,
including Chiswick,
Hammersmith, Brentford
and Isleworth, where
these photographs were
taken in February 2012.
Photos by Paul Clabburn

4. Custom House FROG
More FROG News
We have made three monitoring visits to Custom
House now since we started in late February
2012, and many thanks to Ruthy for being a
founding member of the group with me. So far
we have been getting familiar with the site,
locating the items on the feature list, and taking
some initial photographs. Nearly half the site is
under a sheltered canopy with lower light, so on
the last visit we tried to improve our photographs
there. We are still getting used to the site and
the equipment and we aim to complete an
updated set of photographs of the features when
we can. We also want to look for new and
Photos by Peter previously unrecorded features - we have been
Marchant helping record an interesting feature previously
located by FROG member Mark Jennings in the
area - a livery company plaque from the
Vintners Company (see left). The other
photograph here shows another plaque the
group found, recording Thames High Water.
Greenwich FROG
It’s been an exciting few months in Greenwich. In February a
small group of FROGs were the extras in a Russian TV news
special about the foreshore. The production crew were
genuinely interested in the archaeology, but it was a pretty
grey and cold day, so hopefully they got some good shots.
In March, three of us turned up for a monitoring visit on a
particularly low tide. The top half of the site was covered in
two inches of horrible, slippy mud, so only a handful of the
features we normally monitor were visible. But what we found
instead made up for it a hundred times over. The piles below
the c12 jetty were mostly out of the water and Photo by Nat Cohen
there were several new features visible,
including a large pile of natural and worked
stones near one of the drains. But what was
really exciting was a large area of peat that
starts at the jetty and goes downriver as far as
the Naval College steps. There was a lot of
preserved wood in it, including several
complete tree trunks and what looked to us like
an in situ tree stump. There were also three,
small, round posts in the peat, just visible at
low water, lined up at a very suspicious angle.
Is it a fishtrap? Are three posts enough to tell?
Watch this space.....
Photo by Ann Sydney