8 - The Museum of London: An Overview of Policies and Practice

Summary

Introduction

The collections held by the Museum of London (MoL) have a long history, representing the endeavours of antiquarians and early-Modern excavators working in the City and Greater London area whose finds were deposited originally at the City's Guildhall and London Museum at Kensington Palace. In 1976, as part of the Barbican Estate, the MoL opened to the public and has become one of the largest urban history museums in the world, holding the biggest archaeological archive in Europe. The MoL Group includes the London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre (LAARC) and, until 2011, the commercial field unit, Museum of London Archaeology (MoLA), created in 1991, joining the MoL departments Urban Archaeology (DUA) and Greater London Archaeology (DGLA). The DUA was created in 1970 in response to the destruction of London's archaeology through the construction of deep-basement redevelopment in the City. Both the DUA and DGLA were responsible for much of the early work on Roman and Saxon London.

The LAARC was established in 2002 and holds the archives of archaeological fieldwork (including human remains) carried out in the City and Greater London area over the past 100 years – a figure in excess of 7500 excavations. The majority of the holdings relate to work carried out by the DUA and DGLA during the 1970s and 1980s; Alan Thompson of the DUA was instrumental in ensuring that human remains were curated as part of the site archive, a practice not universal at the time (Roberts 2009).