Toy Green Hampton Court Palace

Initial Watching Brief work during the removal of the railings on Toy Green in advance of the Olympics in July 2012 revealed uninteresting modern topsoil. Later that year in September, Oxford Archaeology carried out a field evaluation in advance of the re-landscaping and reconfiguration of Toy Green and the Trophy Gate entrance to Hampton Court Palace. The evaluation revealed what is almost certainly the northern wall of The Toy Inn, together with a surviving remnant of an internal brick floor and a possible ancillary building or garden wall which does not appear to be depicted on any of the surviving cartographic sources. Additionally, evidence for 20th century landscaping was revealed, which is likely to relate to the construction of the new Hampton Court Bridge and the deepening of the river channel in the early 1930s. Subsequently a watching was maintained during February 2013 during the resurfacing and landscaping works. The watching brief revealed evidence for multiple phases of landscaping, in addition to deposits which are likely to represent earlier surfaces to the west of the Trophy Gate. The bedding layers for these surfaces comprised possible masons’ waste which may have originated from the yards and workshops known to have occupied Outer Green Court in the 16th and 17th centuries. In addition to these surfaces, a brick built cruciform structure was revealed immediately to the west of the Trophy Gate - which was on the same alignment as a NE-SW aligned wall revealed during an earlier watching brief to the south - and may have represented a configuration of the entrance to the Palace predating the construction of the existing structure in 1701. It is possible that this earlier structure is that known to have been constructed on the site of the later Trophy Gate in the first half of the 16th century.