Woolcomber Street

After many years of planning, work finally began on the St James’s redevelopment in Dover during the spring of 2015.

Situated on the eastern side of Dover, below Castle Hill, the new development area will provide a major opportunity to archaeologically examine a substantial part of the old town. This region has always been a suburb, located beyond the main settlement, but it is significantly placed just inland of the seashore, between the historic town centre and the great medieval castle.

During Roman times the whole area was under water, located in the estuary of the River Dour. As the estuary gradually silted-up, habitation became possible. This seems to have begun during the Norman period, when St James’s church was erected at the foot of Castle Hill. By the nineteenth century the entire region was densely packed with streets and houses, together with the grand Burlington Hotel, built in 1864. However, this eastern side of Dover was extensively damaged by shelling and bombing during the Second World War and, as part of the post-War redevelopment of the 1950s and 1960s, virtually all the remaining historic streets and buildings were swept away to be replaced by a new town layout little influenced by its predecessors. Severely damaged by enemy action, St James’s church was preserved as a ruin, but it is now very difficult to closely identify much else of the pre-War town layout on the ground, with at least half a dozen old roads and many houses and shops having disappeared without trace.

The new development is to take place in several phases and Canterbury Archaeological Trust was commissioned to undertake investigations ahead of the first phase, off Woolcomber Street, in May 2015. A new hotel is to be built here and large-scale excavations began in July; they were concluded in October. The excavations fall in an area that the Trust already knows well, having undertaken previous work immediately adjacent during the construction of the Townwall Street dual carriageway (A20) and York Street bypass.

...a new BP petrol filling station during the 1990s.

Hotel excavations

At Woolcomber Street, three separate areas (North-West Area, Central Area and South-East Area) were selected for detailed examination, being largely undisturbed by the deep Victorian cellars and other modern disturbances that had affected several parts of the site. After a period of heavy machine work, the extent of the surviving archaeology became apparent, with clear evidence of pre-War streets and buildings being revealed. Overall, the remains exposed were complex and related to many different phases of activity. Two to three metres of stratified archaeological deposits occurred in all areas. A full-time team of more than twenty CAT excavators, supplemented by KAS and other volunteers, continue to be busily engaged on the site, revealing significant finds on a daily basis.

No town wall

Local antiquarian tradition asserts that the excavations should fall across the line of the otherwise lost medieval town wall of Dover but no evidence for this major structure has been discovered and, most probably, the wall lay further toward the sea in an area subsequently affected by coastal erosion. This was also our conclusion on the adjacent 1996 BP filling station site and it appears that plans published during the nineteenth century are not correct, with the wall’s course on the seaward side shown too far inland.

Early Streets

Amongst the initial discoveries made during the present excavations was the line of Arthur’s Place – one of Dover’s old lanes that formerly ran between the still surviving St James’s Street and now lost Clarence Street. Below its twentieth century tarmac, a succession of earlier metallings was investigated, suggesting that this lane had first been laid out several centuries before. It is clearly shown on a map of 1737 and the archaeology suggests that this street first came into being during medieval times when it was constructed as a substantial raised causeway made from compacted chalk rubble and beach shingle. Work on the 1996 BP filling station site had previously established that Clarence Street...

...was first laid out sometime around the thirteenth century and the evidence thus now combines to suggest that the recorded Victorian street plan of the region largely preserves the original layout of the medieval one.

Quaker burial ground

Documents record that a former garden plot situated at the junction of Clarence Street with Woolcomber Street had once been the site of a small Quaker burial ground, established during the seventeenth century. Part of this cemetery was located and excavated in 2015. Although much of the area had been previously destroyed by recent activity, more than twenty individual graves were carefully exposed and lifted. The latest are probably of nineteenth-century date. The graves had been cut into a sequence of earlier deposits, every bit as complicated as those on other parts of the site and included foundations relating to a substantial medieval building, which seems to have gone out of use sometime before the cemetery was established.

Loads of old rubbish

The excavations have produced vast quantities of domestic rubbish of medieval and early post-medieval date. Many thousands of sherds of pottery, most dated between 1150 and 1450, have been recovered, together with three silver coins and a range of kitchen waste including much animal bone, fish bone and marine shell (particularly limpet). In contrast to many urban sites, most of the medieval waste material was not being dumped into pits but generally spread around the site in levelling.

deposits, often mixed with chalk, beach shingle and demolition rubble. Frequently contained within the deposits of demolition rubble are fragments of roofing slate, traded along the south coast from Devon and Cornwall as early as the thirteenth century.

It would seem that raising the general level of the ground surface across the site was important to the early inhabitants of this region, probably because of the proximity of the sea and the potential threat of marine inundation. Later, during the post-medieval period, more formal arrangements for rubbish disposal came into being and a number of stone-lined cess tanks were constructed in the area. These have produced some large collections of interesting pottery, much of it imported, together with clay tobacco pipes and other household rubbish.

Twelfth and thirteenth century fishermen’s houses

In the South-East Area, adjacent to Townwall Street, a complex succession of chalk-floored buildings with slight traces of associated walls are being investigated in detail. These structures were mainly built of timber and are identical to others previously excavated on the adjacent filling station site in 1996, when they were interpreted as the remains of houses belonging to simple fisher-folk. Occupying the beach ridge beyond the boundaries of the main town during the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, these dwellings are producing many

finds, notably pottery and fish bones, scattered across their floors. Small finds have included fish hooks, spindle whorls and a range of bone pins, whilst a bone dice and a possible bone flute provide a few clues as to how leisure time might have been spent.

As the main excavations draw to a close, demolition work in other parts of the development area are progressing well and new sites for archaeological investigation are becoming available. The prospects for further interesting discoveries within historic Dover presently look good. More later…

by Keith Parfitt