ABSTRACT
The discovery of the site of the Rose Theatre in 1989 and the campaign to have it preserved have been fully documented by Wainwright, Biddle, Chippendale, Orrel and Gurr, and Tilly (Antiquity articles, 1989). The report of the excavation of the site and of a small part of the nearby Globe Theatre has been published by Museum of London Archaeology (Bowsher and Miller, 2011), and the methodology for the reburial of the site has been described (Ashurst et al., 1989). The reburial system was designed to maintain the waterlogged and anaerobic conditions that had preserved the site’s organic remains for four hundred years, as well as providing physical protection for the site from accidentally falling debris during the construction of the building over the site. The Government had provided some £5 million to enable the site developer to redesign the building in such a manner that the theatre remains would be preserved and remain accessible for the study of the evolution of Elizabethan Theatres and for future development as a tourist venue. As a condition of this, English Heritage were required to monitor the site to ensure that there was no deterioration of the reburied remains and the yet unexcavated third of the site. The physico-chemical monitoring of the site has continued at monthly intervals and has
been reported (Corfi eld, 1993; 1996; 2004). For much of the time the monitoring has shown that the conditions for the preservation of the site were being maintained, despite the planned lifetime of the covering system being just two years, this being the time scale for the construction of the new building, after which it was anticipated plans and fi nance for a more permanent solution would have been developed. However, in recent years there have been indications of possible loss of effectiveness and this been suffi cient for English Heritage to place the site on its list of Heritage at Risk.
