Name: Treasures found on HS2 route stored in secret warehouse | BBC News
Uploaded: 2026-02-15T17:10:31.000Z
Duration: 4 min 13 s
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Come on in and welcome to the HS2 Archives.

Adverbs of manner

Charlotte's invited us to this store, the location of which is a closely guarded secret.

So, Charlotte, what wonders are stored within this store?

So I wanted to very quickly show you one of my favourite items.

This is something that has been said in the media previously, but wow, look at that.

Wonders to us, everyday items to our ancestors.

A Saxon comb, a hand axe used more than 40,000 years ago, a medieval sewer's needle case and a smoker's clay pipe.

The full inscription, we understand, would be a phrase associated with gladiators.

So this would have belonged to a gladiator.

Potentially belonged to a gladiator, a former gladiator, perhaps.

It just gives us that glimpse of a connection to that sort of event happening.

There are around 450,000 items in this one warehouse in boxes waiting to be cleaned and fully researched.

But where to store them and who owns them is still often undecided.

Some discoveries were rare, such as unearthing a Roman wishing well.

And what I've got here is some examples of coins from the period that were represented in that well.

The easiest way for us to understand it, it was a well on a natural spring and coins had been deposited and that's what people do.

You throw a coin in the Trevi Fountain, you normally get tight date ranges of coin hoards that have been deposited in a single event.

So to have this chronology through the coins of people visiting the same place in the landscape is really special.

The high speed railway line had to be assessed for its archaeology before construction.

With each dig bringing new finds, building HS2 has changed the landscape along its route, cutting into fields and communities and dividing opinion.

The archaeology discovered can be dazzling.

I think from an archaeological perspective, it absolutely is worth it.

We can use all the archaeological data we have to compare change across time, across large areas and between different regions.

Dentures, but not dentches like we have now.

It's from one of the cemetery sites that were excavated along the scheme.

I mean, that's probably the most bizarre thing on the surface.

Yes, that's the right word for it, I think.

You must be making discoveries every day here.

What is the hopes for the future of these items?

So I would love to see the majority of these items being able to be deposited with the local museums.

An ark holding the tales of our ancestors spanning thousands of years of history, their secrets just waiting to be uncovered and told.