Monday brought an early start - I was going back to school…
We went to Culloden Primary School in Poplar to give an all school series of workshop on the changing built environment of the area around the school, the Olympic park and London in general. I had to help organise the volunteers handing out information sheets etc. and setting up for activities. Each session was only about half an hour long but us volunteers had to move between different classrooms with all the materials quickly so as not to keep the children and their teachers waiting. First off I helped the teacher in a year 5 class talk about the changing nature of the Olympic park, particularly how the map has changed over the years and even how whole streets have disappeared. We emphasised this point by talking about Temple Mills Lane, which was rediscovered in 2008 in excavations for the Velodrome in the north of the site. This road had been buried under around 10 metres of Victorian landfill and we showed the children a Quicktime VR (click and hold then drag cursor to move around 360 degrees) of the archaeologists digging there - I’m the one behind the tripod thing (dumpy-level)! As soon as the kids found out I was an archaeologist they seemed a lot more interested in what they were doing! In other sessions classes compared historic and contemporary maps and thought about the infrastructure needed to host the Olympics.
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| The early 19th century riverboat I helped excavate in December 2007. Pretty cold and that isn't exactly clean water -more like old diesel and who knows what else... Lucky we were wearing protective suits. |
All the volunteers and Janet, Lizzie and Rosie, who prepared for and ran the day, worked incredibly hard to make this all work smoothly and I really think the school children enjoyed it. That said, running a workshop all day for over three hundred children is very tiring so was glad to get home and rest afterwards although it took two hours due to a dodgy DLR train being stuck in the tunnel at Bank. Funnily enough I went home via Stratford as a result and saw the Olympic venues from the Overground that I had been getting the kids to look at that morning and where I had worked three years ago. Back then it was a completely different landscape and not always a pleasant one as you can see from the picture to the right.
On Tuesday I helped with lunch some secondary school pupils who came to TBE for a workshop on the Olympic legacy who then got to go on a tour of the athletes village, which I was quite jealous of! Along with this I continued to work on ‘Digging Hackney’.
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