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Unopened Victorian soft drink bottle found at dig

Tom Jackson
BBC News, Cambridgeshire
Reporting from Arbury
Harriet Heywood
BBC News, Cambridgeshire
Tom Jackson/BBC The green glass bottle has been lay on the ground on top of rubble and stones from the dig. It is dusty and has a thin neck. Tom Jackson/BBC
The oldest discovery at the site so far is a soft drinks bottle, believed to be from the 1890s, with the words Wadsworth's Cambridge

An unopened Victorian soft drink has been discovered by archaeologists ahead of work to turn a shopping centre into a new science hub.

Archaeologists have been excavating a Cambridge car park as part of a multi-million pound project to turn the Grafton shopping centre into labs and offices.

Les Capon, project manager with AOC Archaeology, said he believed part of the area could have been a blacksmith's workshop after discovering evidence of a forge and an anvil.

He added that it was rare to have found the drinks bottle in one piece as children often smashed them to get the small marble out of the glass.

Tom Jackson/BBC Les Capon is smiling at the camera while on site. He is wearing a white hard hat and bright high vis orange coat. He has grey hair and behind him is a yellow excavating machine/ digger.Tom Jackson/BBC
"The archaeological resource is a finite resource, once [land] is excavated and destroyed it's gone and all these moments would be lost," says Les Capon

"Archaeological excavation gives us an insight into the people who lived here, what they were doing and sometimes what their social status was," Mr Capon said.

"In ash pits [where rubbish would be buried in gardens] is where we get the goodies.

"A lot of the broken things you see in museums come from the rubbish pits of the past... they tell us what life was like, the status of the people living there, how rich they were and what they were consuming or throwing away."

Tom Jackson/BBC A yellow digger has broken through the earth and is pulling up soil from a hole. Around the hole are what appears to be cobbles and brick. Tom Jackson/BBC
Archaeologists believe the space was once used as a small local blacksmith's which would fix wheelbarrows, roof tiles and occasionally horse shoes

While excavating the area in Cambridge, Mr Capon said they came across a glass soft drinks bottle he estimated dated from the 1890s.

The bottle has a squeeze neck which still hold the marble inside that would have helped stop the fizz escaping the bottle.

"Usually these bottles are broken by children to get the marble out, but this one is complete and may have been stored in a basement on a shelf and was never taken out prior to demolition," Mr Capon added.

The archaeologist added he was not sure what some of the buildings at the site were previously used for, until they started to dig.

One space had a section in the floor that was likely to have held an anvil as archaeologists found bits of broken metal around it.

They said the ground surface was "hard worn" and there was an "area of disturbance" in the corner, which could represent the location of a forge.

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