Open Doors offers unique glimpse at city’s lost past

It is not just the experience of a decade but of a lifetime. The Westgate Centre’s excavation site simply won’t be here this time next year,” Jane Baldwin of Oxford’s Open Doors tells me, when highlighting this weekend’s festival.

Ben Ford, Oxford Archaeology’s excavation director and senior project manager agrees. “This weekend is a tiny window of opportunity. It’s the last chance the public have to get involved,” he tells me.

To cut a long story short, when plans were drawn up for the Westgate Centre, Oxford Archaeology was called in to discover what was underneath. They found evidence of a medieval site, and after the multi-storey car park was pulled down earlier this year, the team went in and discovered the remains of an entire Friary.

The Greyfriars came to Oxford in 1225, were gifted some land, and built their friary on flooded land outside the castle gates, later extended, where they lived for the next 300 years until Henry VIII’s Dissolution of The Monasteries in 1538, when it was ransacked, knocked down, and largely forgotten, until now.

Ben Ford and his team still had no idea what an enormous discovery this would be until they painstakingly uncovered the seven buildings including the friary’s church, kitchens, dormitory, toilet block, dining hall, storage areas, cloisters and chapter house.

“It wasn’t until we stripped it all back that we realised the real extent of what we had found,” he says. “Anyone who says we were living in caves during the medieval period should come and have a look, because 700 years ago Greyfriars was state of the art. They had all the mod cons.

“We have recovered sluice gates to channel the water through the site, which was raised so it didn’t flood.

“The toilet blocks had streams running through them, the kitchens were enormous and had bread ovens and roasting hearths.

“We have found thousands of leather objects from pointed boots to bowls, money purses to bags, lead pipes for the water, and even an ox. Really ingenious.”

Tasked with uncovering, recording and protecting the site before it gets concreted over again with the foundations of the new Westgate Centre, preserving it for future generations, this was always going to be a job with a tight schedule.

“It is standard archaeological practice across the country,” Ben tells me.

This Saturday, as part of Oxford’s Open Doors, you can visit the archaeology site, take guided tours, listen to talks by the excavators themselves, view the retrieved artefacts and witness the discovery, one last time.

So is Ben sad, that after all his hard work, the medieval site will be covered up again?

“That’s what makes it so exciting. Opportunities like this just don’t come along very often.

“This is the biggest archaeological dig Oxford has ever seen and the most well preserved I have ever come across. It’s why you become an archaeologist. Every day something new is unearthed and you are constantly asking yourself questions.

What’s inside there? Who built it? Why? How? All mixed into a very short time frame.”

• Archaeologist Ben Ford leads the only other public tour at the Westgate site this year

In the meantime Ben and his team are working frantically to get it all ready in time.

“By the end of the year the foundations will be laid and the excavation site will have disappeared again.

We then need to curate, treat and record each artefact before they can be put on display in the local museums.”

Oxford Archaeology is also working on a Westgate Centre app, so when you walk through the new shopping centre you will be able to see what lay beneath it all those years ago.

“It’s all evidence that our urban environment is in a constant state of change and renewal.”

“Put it this way, I’ll still be working on this when you’re shopping in John Lewis,” Ben says smiling. And will he be shopping there too? “No, I live in Reading and we’ve already got one,” he says, returning to his beloved mud, shaking his head.

* Oxford Open Doors, now in its eighth year, is committed to opening up hundreds of Oxford’s buildings to share their treasures with the public. Most are part of Oxford University, and are open to view free.

Where and when
The Westgate excavation site is part of Oxford Open Doors this weekend.
Go to www.opendoorsuk.org for full programme