Unlocking Old Windsor: An Assessment of Brian Hope-Taylor's 1953-58 Excavation Archive from Kingsbury, Old Windsor, Berkshire

Abstract

This collection comprises image, text and spreadsheet data from the Unlocking Old Windsor project which made an assessment of Brian Hope-Taylor's 1953-58 excavation archive from Kingsbury, Old Windsor, Berkshire. Between 1953 and 1958 the late Brian Hope-Taylor undertook six seasons of excavation at the site. Discoveries included a remarkable sequence of Saxon and Early Norman remains from the 7th - 11th-centuries, reported at the time as including a Mid-Saxon settlement, a 9th-century mill leat and watermill, and a series of high-quality buildings and finds indicative of a Late Saxon and Early Norman royal complex. The Unlocking Old Windsor Project, funded by Historic England and undertaken as a collaboration between the University of Reading and Berkshire Archaeological Society, was created to take a substantial step forward to rehabilitate Hope-Taylor's excavations and to realise its potential as a site of national importance. The project sets out to consolidate, secure and digitally unify the archive and to analyse a key sample of the records to generate, for the first time, an informed archaeological narrative of the site and a robust evaluation of its potential for future research