This keenly anticipated volume sets out the findings from the 2005 excavations in the Upper Walbrook Valley at 35 Basinghall Street in London. The Walbrook Valley has been the subject of intense scholarly and public interest owing to its favourable taphonomy producing remarkable discoveries. This book focuses on the abundant evidence for the glass industry in this area of Roman London — consisting of at least 70 kg of cullet and glass-working debris. It is not, however, a simple excavation report, nor is it entirely about the glass-working in evidence at the site. The book is a truly interdisciplinary effort and all the excavated material is described in detail by a large collection of individual specialists. The authors aimed to place the Basinghall material in the wider context of glass-working in the western Empire (5), with close attention to the organisation of the industry, but also to shed light on glass consumption in Roman London and Britain. All these aims are achieved with aplomb.

After a brief introduction (1–7), the volume chronologically sets out the archaeological sequence at the site (8–35). In a method employed throughout the work, the analysis is interspersed with high-resolution excavation photographs (with in-situ finds) and detailed archaeological plans, coupled with artefact photographs and illustrations. The text is scholarly, rigorous and easy to follow; moreover, the images and intuitive and attractive typography act to enhance these qualities. The next section (36–74) focuses on the glass-working waste from the site which includes both furnace remains and residues, glass cullet, and blowing by-products such as moils, glass-trails, droplets and tooled remains. The section was compiled with the consultation of experimental Roman glass-workers Mark Taylor and David Hill (details: www.theglassmakers.co.uk) who have worked on Roman glass for more than 25 years. Taylor and Hill have been instrumental in forming our present understanding of the production of Roman glass and they have consistently challenged seemingly-unmoveable paradigms and worked alongside prominent glass specialists. Accordingly, alongside the copious material from Basinghall are photographs of experimental processes in which Taylor and Hill depict their constantly evolving and well-researched chaînes opératoires to explain the origin of the archaeological remains.

Composition analysis is the subject of ch. 4 (75–90). Glass composition expert Ian Freestone headed a team to analyse the origin of the glass worked at 35 Basinghall Street, concluding that at some point three types of glass were brought to the site via the Mediterranean to be worked in their pristine state: ‘natural’ blue-green, colourless (antimony decolourised) and nearly-colourless (manganese decolourised). Basinghall adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests that these three glass compositions were commonly used alongside one another, backing up evidence found at both Leicester (Jackson et al., in Pernicka and Wagner (eds), Archaeometry 90, 295–305) and Mancetter (Jackson, Archaeometry 47, 763–80). This information leads to an intriguing supposition that the workers that set up the workshops at Basinghall (as well as Leicester and Mancetter) arrived from the Mediterranean with fresh ‘raw’ glass, as if they had relocated from elsewhere in London or the north-western provinces, they would have done so with cullet. The peripatetic nature of glass-blowers in the Roman East and in Italy is well known from epigraphy, but this sort of evidence allows us to fit Britannia into this wider socio-technical world.

Ch. 5 (91–110) places Basinghall in its wider context, both within London — where glass-working began c. a.d. 50–60 with the making of beads at Gresham Street, and glass-blowing began in the late a.d. 60s producing stirring rods alongside small flasks/unguentaria and cups — but also in Britannia and the wider Roman world. The volume concludes with the specialist appendices (111–55) detailing the building materials, pottery, industrial residues, vessel glass, accessioned finds, archaeobotanical material and faunal assemblages, which, in keeping with the rest of the volume, are thorough and well illustrated.

In assessing the usefulness of the reviewed volume for Roman glass specialists, Romano-British archaeologists and historians, and other interested parties, it seems apposite to quote the concluding remark of ch. 4 (89): ‘This investigation represents what is arguably the most detailed analytical investigation of a Roman glass workshop to date.’