Community Excavations at Cranford Park
In September 2021, AOC held the first field season of a 4-year programme of community excavations at Cranford Park in London Borough of Hillingdon. There was regular attendance of 12 members of the public throughout the entire three-week programme, with around 50 people attending at the weekends. The event culminated in an Open Weekend coinciding with the Heritage Open Day Festival.
Cranford Park is an ancient landholding, historically owned by the Berkeley family who had the land for 300 years, starting with Lady Elizabeth Berkeley, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth I. Successive Berkeley’s expanded and upgraded the manor house, its facilities, and its pleasure gardens.
Fragments of clay tobacco pipes were among the artefacts discovered
Work was carried out by volunteers under the guidance of AOC’s archaeologists
The Berkeleys eventually moved on from Cranford House, and in the process sold off swathes of land to house builders. A large park still remains and is now owned by London Borough of Hillingdon, with the 18th century stable block surviving as the only standing building and the rest buried below the ground.
The community excavation is one part of a National Heritage Lottery Funded project to regenerate the park. As part of a package of funding valuing £3.47 million, the stables are going to be restored, a new café and playground built, whilst the 18th century cellars which are still surviving underground are going to be restored and converted into a community event space.
The first community excavation targeted the location of the manor house, which is going to be the focus of 2022 regeneration work. We excavated one large open area, and four test pits located over the cellars to inform the architects designs.
Beneath a layer of widespread demolition debris, the latest phase of Cranford House, broadly the 19th century phases were revealed, this included projecting bays, the main threshold to the house, a gravel pathway and flowerbed edgings. Perhaps more exciting (and what we had hoped we would discover!), was a later phase of Tudor walls belonging to the original manor house which were found towards the southern half of the excavation area. This had an associated demolition layer which included glass and lead strips from windows, green glazed floor tiles, roof tiles, and shaped bricks from windows – all indicative of a Tudor date.
The remains of past buildings revealed once again
Mysterious barrel-vaulted chamber
York Stone entrance to Cranford House
The test pits revealed the tops of the cellars, and intriguingly an additional barrel-vaulted chamber which has no visible entrance from within the existing cellars themselves! A key research question for the next season of excavation will be to explore this mysterious chamber and where it leads to.
AOC is proud to be a part of this multi-year project which is going to have such a long-lasting impact on the local community.