Sara Perry
University of York
Supermarket Ruins: Archaeological stories for our times
Panel: Materiality
Today many institutions collect, manage, and display archaeological artefacts and data. Unfortunately, archaeology’s current methods can make it difficult to tell stories, share findings and rediscover places in ways that are democratic, engaging and just.
This paper presents a live project being undertaken by the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), Recycle Archaeology, Transforming Data Reuse in Archaeology, and BA Illustration Animation Students at Kingston School of Art. Supermarket Ruins focuses on excavations undertaken in advance of the construction of a gigantic John Lewis store in Kingston Town Centre in the 1980s. During community excavations mediaeval buildings were unearthed. Following local agitation aimed at preserving this heritage, the ruins were encased in concrete and deposited in the basement of the new supermarket, where they remain today. The photographs, data and finds from the excavations were removed to the Museum of London Archaeological Archives but were never made available as a full report for the public to read.
In 2022, the ruins in the supermarket basement were made accessible to the public in a new community artspace under the John Lewis superstore (see below). For the first time since the original excavations the ruins became accessible for new kinds of place-making. Our project explores the storytelling possibilities of these ruins in a way that engages with the unpublished site archives as well as the future of superstores in our changing townscapes. Through creative collaboration between archaeologists and creative practitioners we will re-animate the photographs, documents, videos, and artefacts from the excavations alongside these ruins in the context of late capitalism.
Deselected archaeological artefacts from excavations nearby will be supplied by Recycle Archaeology, allowing students to engage with the remnants of goods made and used, bought and sold, during the centuries when the ruins were inhabited.
This paper reports on the first results of our experiments created over the course of Supermarket Ruins’ early stages. We document and discuss how archaeologists and illustrators interacted at our workshops and events inside the supermarket basement and at Museum of London Archaeology to investigate how interdisciplinary collaborations might provide a template for 'heritage as process', reanimating the everyday spaces of our past and present town centre ruins as spaces of visual storytelling and co-creation.
Sara Perry is Senior Research Fellow at MOLA, and formerly its Director of Research & Engagement (2019-2023). She is also Honorary Professor and, previously, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Heritage Management at the University of York (UK). She leads Transforming Data Reuse in Archaeology, an international research project focused on experimenting with archaeological data through storytelling.