What the Thompson's Lane dig found: 2,800 years in one plot

The site

The site is known as WYNG Gardens. Until 2014 it held 1 to 8 St Clement's Gardens, a terrace of Edwardian townhouses built in 1911. Clearing them gave the Cambridge Archaeological Unit about 640 square metres to work in, far more than earlier digs nearby. Craig Cessford's report appeared in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society in 2017, and everything below comes from it unless we say otherwise. It sits alongside our page on the smaller dig at 24 Thompson's Lane, and it changes that picture in places.

A Bronze Age river

At the bottom lay an old channel of the Cam. Twelve oak trunks and branches had washed downstream and settled together at the edge of a slow backwater. Tree rings from seven of them gave a 310-year sequence, 1257 to 948 BC. One tree probably died around 1000 BC, and another around 900 BC, after perhaps 400 years of growth.

People hardly feature. Sieving 84 litres of silt produced no pottery and no flint, and the only animal bone was a cow's leg bone plus four scraps. Pollen points to reedswamp and oak woodland, without crops. A cluster of small stakes, mostly alder, shows someone was doing something on the bank around 800 BC. The report admits it can't say what.

Floods and ploughing

Next comes a thick layer of grey silt, found on floodplains across southern England. Clearing trees and ploughing deeply upstream sent soil into the rivers, which then overflowed. By now cereal pollen is plentiful, so farming had reached the valley, though nobody seems to have lived on this spot.

A Roman town on the wrong side of the river?

Roman Cambridge is usually placed on Castle Hill. This dig makes that less certain. A ditch about 3.4 metres wide, dug in the mid to late 1st century, crossed the whole site some 65 metres from Bridge Street, on a scale that suggests some central authority. Finds included 1,942 pieces of pottery, 34 coins from Nero to Valens, and heating tiles hinting at a substantial building nearby.

The star find is a small one. A piece of fine 2nd-century Samian beaker from eastern Gaul has letters scratched under the rim, apparently Pio(t)ri(x), probably a name meaning "pious woman". The report calls a personal name on Samian unparalleled locally.

Cessford argues for a dual settlement, with important parts on both banks. Be careful with that, as he is. Most of the Roman town would lie along Bridge Street, where modern basements have dug much of it away, so it may never be fully understood. He also treats the supposed Roman fort on Castle Hill as unproved. Our Castle Mound page covers the other side.

A few burials turned up, too few to call a cemetery. Medieval ditch diggers later disturbed some of them, then reburied the larger bones in shallow scoops.

An empty stretch, and a Danish problem

After the Romans, the wet returned. Silt piled up again, and from the 5th to the 10th centuries there's no sign of anyone living here, apart from two pieces of early pottery at 24 Thompson's Lane. Oddly, lead levels in the silt rise, probably Roman waste washing into the river long afterwards.

This matters for a popular story. Some accounts place Danish traders around Quayside from about 900. Cessford says recent digs don't support significant settlement in St Clement's parish then, and that occupation began around the mid-10th century, tight against Bridge Street. The working river page sets out both views. Absence of evidence on a few plots isn't proof, but the burden has shifted.

Reclaiming the bank, earlier than we thought

Our archaeology page dates reclamation to the 14th to 16th centuries, based on 24 Thompson's Lane. Here it starts in the 11th or 12th century, with drainage gullies, sumps and a large ditched enclosure, probably the back of a Bridge Street property about 80 metres long. One post was radiocarbon dated to between 1016 and 1155. Both can be true if the bank was won plot by plot.

The report also reinterprets 24 Thompson's Lane, seeing a large 12th-century channel running to the river. It would have helped drainage and could have let small boats in. There may have been dozens along this bank.

Then there's the King's Ditch. Cessford dates its creation to between the mid-11th and early 13th centuries, most probably the 12th, perhaps linked to the Anarchy of 1143 to 1144. The ditch may be what finally stopped the flooding here. A map of 1574 credits it to Henry III instead.

Boats and pots

Medieval pottery ties the place to the river. Stamford ware makes up an unusually high share of the 10th to 12th century finds, 109 of 385 pieces among the main types, and Cessford thinks it probably came by boat. A rare 13th-century pitcher from Saintonge in western France may even be linked to a mayor of Cambridge, the report suggests.

St John's College and a church in the cesspit

St John's College owned the land from 1533 to 1795. Unusually for Cambridge, the tenants seem to have shared a well and cesspit, rather than each having their own. When the first ones proved too small, a bigger stone-lined cesspit replaced them in the mid-16th century.

That stone is the surprise. Many blocks came from a church with work of the 13th and 14th centuries: arches, part of what's probably a tomb chest, and a finely cut piece of a four-light window of after 1370. The church can't have been far off. One candidate is the medieval Hospital of St John, the college's predecessor, but that's a suggestion rather than a finding. Nearby pits were part-filled with rough stone that Cessford reads as ballast, a neat hint of boats unloading close by.

Later rebuilding reused more. A shaft built in the late 17th century contained Tudor window pieces still showing old paint, with the lead drilled out of the shutter fittings. There was also a small practice carving of a coat of arms. About 50 families could fit it, so nobody can say whose it was.

The cooks' plates

Around 1791 to 1795 the buildings came down and the plot became a garden. A dump from that clearance holds the most human find here: plates marked with hand-painted names. Scott and Smithson match William Scott and Christopher Smithson, cooks at St John's. College cooks at the time ran as semi-independent businessmen and often owned the crockery, hence their names. Another plate carries S I C, for the college itself.

A cellar nearby was filled with tea bowls, posset pots, chamber pots and a tankard. At least eleven flowerpots were dumped as well, probably from the garden there. A college plan of 1748 even names two occupants, surnamed Rayner and Brogden. The garden lasted until the terrace of 1911, which came down in 2014 and made all this possible.

What to keep in mind

This is one plot, and one report's interpretation. It describes ground a little way behind the quay, not the quay itself. We've read the published paper, not the unpublished site report behind it.

Sources

• Craig Cessford, excavations at WYNG Gardens, Thompson's Lane, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 2017. Used for everything on this page, except where another source is named.

Sources checked October 2026.