Auer & Maarleveld (eds): The Gresham Ship Project, Volume 1

Abstract

The management of England’s underwater cultural heritage (UCH) has fundamentally changed during the last decade and a half. In 2002 English Heritage, now Historic England, assumed the responsibility for the overall management of material within England’s territorial waters. This included overseeing the Protection of Wrecks Act (1973), the principle legislative tool under UK law for looking after historic shipwrecks. This was followed in 2009 by the Marine and Coastal Access Act which included the establishment of the Marine Management Organisation (MMO) to plan, license and monitor all development activity taking place within England’s territorial waters. This includes development that might impact upon UCH, for which the MMO is provided with statutory advice by Historic England. Although there are still well documented issues surrounding the archiving and dissemination of maritime archaeological material (e.g. Ransley and Satchell 2014) the provision for the protection and management of UCH across the constituent countries of the UK means that compliance with the UNESCO 2001 Convention would be relatively straightforward were the UK government to ratify it (see UK UNESCO 2001 Convention Review Group 2013). In the midst of this management sea-change lay the large-scale dredging of the Princes Channel in the Thames Estuary to service the development of the Thames Gateway port. Although taking place prior to the establishment of the MMO, the Thames Gateway work is notable because of the willingness of the Port of London Authority (PLA) to engage with, and take account of heritage concerns, although they were not technically obliged to do so. On a wider scale, such consideration has resulted in the publication of an account of wider development-led work in the Thames Estuary (Firth et al. 2012) and the designation of the site of the warship London, lost in 1665 and currently undergoing excavation. In 2003 the PLA recovered what appeared to be an old cannon and an anchor from a wreck site in the Princes Channel and contacted Wessex Archaeology to seek an inspection