ABSTRACT
As the Great Fire of London raged through the narrow, mainly wooden-built streets of London in September 1666, it reduced all the buildings and businesses on Rood Lane in the eastern part of the city of London to cinders. Here, as elsewhere in the city, new buildings soon grew up on the site, mirroring precisely the same property demarcations as the old street. A cycle of partial reconstructions and renewals continued over the next couple of centuries until, in 2008, a major new build was planned (Figure 27.1). But this reconstruction took place in a very different disciplinary and legislative planning environment, requiring construction companies, once they had cleared the site, to allow archaeologists a period of investigation before building could go ahead.1 Consequently, after the previous building was demolished, a team of archaeologists from MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) proceeded to uncover the extended history of Roman to seventeenth-century London that had survived and lain long forgotten in the ground below.
