A time-traveller's life in Norwich past

Brian Ayers - time traveller

In the right hands, archaeology is a kind of alchemy that breathes life into fragments of stone or soil or pottery. ROWAN MANTELL meets a man who can make the stones of a modern city street speak of thousands of years of history.

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When Brian Ayers walks through Norwich he sometimes slips back through the centuries and sees the past. On busy Rose Lane the 20th century television offices dissolve and he is staring at a Viking-style wooden stave church. At the end of London Street he sees a pagan temple; down at Carrow Road the football fades and a reedy island in the middle of the marshy flood-plain comes into focus, where, 12,000 years ago, men with sharpened flints are skinning a just-killed deer.

Brian is an archaeologist and, for him, Norwich teems not just with the visible people, roads and buildings, but with the people, buildings, street-plans, work and worship, dreams and disasters of anyone who has ever left a mark on the city.

Every street corner can be redolent of an ancient meeting place, any boundary a place of burial. Every stone really does have a story to tell, if only you can read its language.

And Brian is fluent in the language of the past - translating from prehistoric flints, through fragments of Roman road and long-forgotten churches to the bricks of Victorian terraced houses and even the tarmac of modern car parks.

He first dug into the past, literally, as a 12-year-old, joining an archaeology group and helping excavate an Iron Age fort and a Roman rubbish ditch. It was the beginning of his life-long fascination with history.

Thirty years ago he arrived in Norwich for a job interview. It was his first visit but he fell in love with the city. “I was gobsmacked,” he said. “I remember my wife saying, 'This is so lovely. I hope you get the job.'” He did, and the rest really is history.

Brian lives right in the centre of the city and said: “I like towns. I love visiting the countryside but I find towns fascinating. Here you have got somewhere that has been changing for one and half thousand years.”

And despite his 30 years of digging down beneath the city and building up a unique knowledge of its past; despite the sheer number of people who have documented Norwich's history, there is still plenty to learn.

“You can still find things out,” said Brian.

He would love to dig in the Cathedral Close, opposite the Playhouse, along the river… but he discovered a single stone in one of the city's main museums can still surprise him, when a PhD student noticed and identified a widow's face carved above the entrance to Stranger's Hall.

One of his own first Norwich discoveries was a whole church, which turned out to be the oldest of its kind in Europe.

It's the wooden Viking church he sees on Rose Lane. Where most people see the modern Anglia Television building, Brian is looking at a 10th century church.

Actually, all he saw during the 1979 excavation, was a series of holes, or differently coloured soil which had once been holes, but it was enough to identify it as a particular type of Anglo-Scandinavian church.

And it is a ringing endorsement of the power of archaeology. “If it hadn't been for careful archaeological observations we would never have known it was there,” he said. Instead, as soon as he saw the holes which showed wooden posts had once held up a building here, he knew what he was looking at.

“You would have recognised it! It was church-shaped!” he said.

It turned out to be the oldest example ever found in Europe of a Scandinavian-style stave church.

If Brian continues his walk to the end of London Street, looking at the “forget-me-not church” ahead, the hubbub of the 21st century falls away and he sees a sacred building, standing at the end of a promontory. A stream flows down to the main river in the valley below, a Roman road runs past, and pagan burial urns are interred here.

On Ber Street he strips away the buildings to see a Bronze Age burial mound silhouetted on the skyline.

But despite his love of the past, or maybe because of it, Brian is a big believer in change and progress too. One of the things he most loves about cities is how they are constantly changing. Sometimes that change means archaeologists get the chance to discover more about the past. In his ideal world, it would mean future plans could be informed by what is uncovered, perhaps by echoing the lines of vanished buildings beneath.

He is particularly big on preserving a feel for the past by keeping to the old street plans. It's not new buildings he objects to, but new buildings set back from their predecessors and neighbours, as in Pottergate. And flyovers. He hates flyovers. Or, more precisely, Norwich's Magdalen Street flyover which tears through ancient streets. “It's such a tragedy,” he said. “It separates the north and south of the city and I don't think the city can be stitched back together again while it is there. In an ideal world I would remove Anglia Square and put Botolph Street back!

“Why do we like streets like Elm Hill? It's because we get an idea of the past.”

But he cautioned: “We should not stop change because otherwise you just get a fossilised, dead community. It's fascinating to try and understand what made this city tick in the past and use what we know of the past to help develop the city in the future.”

The downside of working in a city is land value. Its high price means that owners must maximise income and need to have a new building in place as quickly as possible. Plans have to be submitted before any archaeological survey is complete, so discoveries cannot usually be incorporated into the new building. In the world according to Brian, ancient cloisters discovered beneath a recent dig would be echoed in the footprint of the modern building above ground.

Some of his discoveries are gone for ever - nothing at all remains of that stave church on Rose Lane. But the Norman stone house he found beneath the Magistrates Court, complete with an extremely rare inside toilet periodically flushed by the river, is still there and occasionally opened to the public.

Brian stepped down as Norfolk County Archaeologist last year, to oversee the excavation of one of Europe's most spectacular archaeological sites. Butrint, in Albania, includes Roman ruins and Byzantine mosaics.

Brian, still based in Norwich, is director of the Butrint Foundation, which exists to help Albanian people preserve the incredible site.

Yesterday he returned from his latest visit to Albania, where “his” site includes a temple, a theatre originally built by the Greeks and rebuilt by the Romans, a Roman gymnasium, a huge Roman villa and a sixth-century baptistery complete with mosaics. The ruins date back to the fourth century BC and are particularly picturesque, surrounded by trees and water.

Yet despite the lure of the Mediterranean, Brian's heart is still here, on the shores of the North Sea.

His book Norwich: Archaeology of a Fine City, has just been updated and republished. It includes material from the most recent digs he oversaw, including the new Cathedral Hostry, on the old Bussey's site in Palace Street, and along Fishergate. And alongside the big discoveries - the churches and cloisters and big houses lost for centuries, he loves the smaller finds too, the evidence of a 10th century kitchen blaze in Palace Street. The purse of coins lost by a shopper in Fishergate 1,300 years ago.

“Archaeology is a privilege. It's a detective story. It keeps the brain working because you are constantly asking questions about what you see,” said Brian.

In 2003 a few splinters of stone unearthed from beneath Norwich City's Jarrold Stand summoned a story almost 12,000 years old. A hunting party of our Stone Age ancestors probably stalked and killed a deer here, and stopped on a marshy island to skin the animal. Their hastily fashioned flint tools, discovered before the new stand was constructed, became the earliest record of human activity within the area which is now Norwich.

When he is not slipping between past and present in his mind's eye, Brian enjoys visiting art galleries, reading, going to the cinema, visiting churches, coastal walks, learning about geology. History is all around for him. Family holidays when his two grown-up daughters were children involved “beaches - and castles and churches and history!”

Today, apart from the new challenge of his ancient Albanian archaeology, he has a growing interest in Norwich's industrial heritage, and the links across the North Sea which, over past millennia, have sometimes been more important than our land links with the rest of Britain. Here in East Anglia he believes we are more Anglo-Scandinavian than Anglo-Saxon. He plans another book.

But if he could really step back into Norwich's past - when would he choose?

“Between the 9th and the 12th centuries. It's a time of utter change. You go from a relatively small settlement along both banks of the river, to a great regional capital, getting towards being the second city of England. We are going from tiny, to something magnificent in 300 years and I find that fascinating.

“And you have got all the big, status buildings going in (with the exception of the Friaries and they appear in the 13th century) the Castle, the Cathedral, the Market, the port…”

And where? “Anywhere.”

For an insight into the city's archaeology he would obviously recommend his book - aimed at the general, interested reader. And then getting out among the speaking stones.

He can begin a walk in a car park and not get out of the barriers before he has traversed several centuries. Start at the Adam and Eve car park and walk a few metres along Bishopgate and, as well as the more well-known treasures, his journey through time will take in the foundation of the Norwich School in the 13th century, a strictly Methodist aristocrat, a stretch of double-walled Cathedral Close and the parish with no population which caused it, a 15th century joke carved into the Bishop's gate and the oldest fragment of wall still standing in Norwich.

Norwich: Archaeology of a Fine City, by Brian Ayers, is published by Amberley, and priced at £16.99.