Finds and Conservation

Lining the shelves of a Museum of London warehouse are thousands of boxes of the broken and fragmented belongings of Victorian Londoners. But how might such evidence – the product of recent archaeological excavations across the city – contribute to our understanding of the social and cultural worlds of Victorian Londoners? Can it take us beyond the familiar tropes of social investigation, or past the enduring literary narratives that have so powerfully influenced the historical imagination? Does it allow us to grasp the ‘actualities’ of life in the modern metropolis that are otherwise obscured by a pervasive bourgeois gaze that saturates other historical sources? Taking inspiration from methodological perspectives developed by North American and Australian historical archaeologists, this article deploys an ‘ethnography of place’ approach to demonstrate and evaluate the contribution of material evidence to the study of the nineteenth-century city. Sifting through a rich assemblage of objects discarded by a group of households in mid-century Limehouse and weaving it together with a range documentary sources that cast light on the function, ownership and use of the material artefacts, it explores everyday domestic life in the Victorian East End. It reveals the promise (and limitations) of such evidence in understanding the active role of objects in people's lived experience; in enabling a better grasp of the complexities of metropolitan social worlds; and in comprehending the banal and mundane elements of everyday life in the city that are so often invisible to the historian's eye.

"In recent years historians have begun to show renewed interest in studying ‘the material’ dimensions to urban life. This shift has opened up a space for new dialogues between historians and post-medieval archaeologists working on British cities. It offers the potential for reassessing approaches to studying the urban past and for experimenting with fresh methodologies. Noting that archaeological perspectives have been largely absent from recent historical accounts of the modern metropolis, in this chapter we explore the potential for pursuing collaborative research that fuses archaeological evidence and thinking with other forms of historical practice to write material histories of London.

The discussion divides into three parts. First, we sketch the post-war development of urban post-medieval archaeology in London, and the range of archaeological collections and excavation sites that relate to the Georgian and Victorian city. Second, we consider some of the ways in which the analysis of these sources might be used in interdisciplinary urban historiography, especially
in the light of methodological approaches developed in North American and Australian urban archaeology. Third, we present a case study that explores how nineteenth-century
household archaeologies in London might be developed, examining some of the complexities and challenges of integrating archaeological methods into the study of households and
localities in the nineteenth-century metropolis. In conclusion we consider the prospects for the development of interdisciplinary approaches to the material remains of London’s modern past."