Bringing Roman town’s lost Edwardian navvies to life
A new project in collaboration with English Heritage
I’ve had the pleasure to work with English Heritage on a few different projects in the past, and it’s always a very exciting thing for me. I absolutely love the way that they make use of technology (especially digital colorization), having a great understanding of how it can be paired with different areas to enrich the experience of the people they would like to reach.
In 2018 we collaborated on a project which aim was to identify World War I nurses who worked at Wrest Park, Bedfordshire, the country’s first wartime country house hospital.
This time, the mission is similar: identify the anonymous workers at the heart of the Roman Corbridge’s (Coria) extraordinary excavation operation (1906-1914), in a new exhibition at Corbridge Roman town on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland.
The curator Frances McIntosh told The Guardian:
“I’ve always wanted to know their names,” she said. “These are men forgotten about and overlooked because they were the working men, they were in unstable, short-term contracts. They were labourers, agricultural workers, brickies … but the excavations could not have been done without these guys.”
She has been sending copies of the photographs to “parish councils, contacting Facebook groups and using local newspapers to help find the names”, and has managed to name 11 men so far.
“You do look back at black and white photographs and forget that things were in colour, the same as you forget there was colour in the Roman world. You come to a Roman site and see yellow, or grey, or brown stone but actually the buildings would have been much brighter. You look at a black and white photograph from Edwardian times; that’s not what life was like, it was in colour.”
The photographs, which I’ve had the pleasure to colorize, will go on display – outside in the ruins themselves – in the hope more names can be found.
You can read more and see the photos here.
Do support English Heritage if you can. They are doing important work. And don’t hesitate to reach out to them if you happen to know someone in the pictures.
Meanwhile, here’s a photo that made my week.
See you again soon!
