ENCOUNTERS

WATCH

Lines to the past

HS2, the new high-speed railway linking London to Birmingham and beyond, is a mammoth undertaking. An official review leaked to the Financial Times in January suggested that the eventual cost may be in excess of £100bn. In this context, the millions spent on upwards of a thousand archaeologists to dig at key historical sites along the route seems like small change.

Yet the scale of these operations is made clear in the first episode in a three- part series charting the work of the archaeologists. It follows the excavations at St James Gardens in Euston, site of the line’s London terminus. The area was a cemetery for a little more than 60 years from 1788 onward, and hundreds of archaeologists have been at work carefully uncovering graves at the site, working beneath a vast temporary canopy. Up close, the scale is breathtaking.

As anthropologist Alice Roberts and historian Yasmin Khan discover, many of these largely Georgian-era remains are remarkably