What’s Down There?
In 2012, the body of Richard III was discovered under a car park in Leicester.
Richard had been killed in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, while fighting the forces of Henry Tudor. (“A horse! a horse! My kingdom for a horse”. Not sure if he got a horse but he definitely lost his kingdom.) Richard was the last English king killed in battle. Henry Tudor became King Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty and the father of everyone’s favorite king, Henry VIII.
How many people wandered around that parking lot not knowing that a major historic figure was just a few feet below them? How many people parked their cars nearly on top of his royal head?
In a place like England, and especially London, the ancient is everywhere. Dig a new Underground tunnel and you’re bound to run into pieces of Roman Londinium, or Anglo-Saxon, Norman or maybe Elizabethan London, long forgotten or misplaced.
It’s not just the distant history that may be nearby, yet lost to us. Beneath the sidewalks of Westminster, just a stone’s through from the Abbey and Houses of Parliament lay the War Cabinet rooms of Winston Churchill. Abandoned almost immediately after VJ day in 1945, the rooms lay abandoned and largely forgotten by all but a few. Pedestrians of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s (including me I guess) trod obliviously above the rooms where strategy was planned, life and death decisions were made, with the fate of Western Europe hanging in the balance.
In 1984, the rooms were re-opened to the public. Today, visitors can spend hours looking into communications rooms, meeting rooms and bed rooms. They can peek down into the crawl space where staff would go to try to catch a little sleep. The map rooms and eating spaces are all there to see. A visitor could spend hours just in the section that serves as a very thorough museum on the life of Churchill. All of this exists in a space that had been overlooked for decades not that long ago.
So as I walk along the streets of Notting Hill or along the Thames, I can’t help but wonder what little known or forgotten treasures are right in front of, or perhaps right beneath me.