Results of excavations in and around Rainham have provided important information on the ritual and settlement landscape of the Thames gravels and within the adjacent Thames alluvial deposits. The major discovery in North West London was of a substantial ditch, undated, but pre-Iron Age, at Isleworth, just to the south of Syon Park. Traces survived of a bank accompanying the ditch, which sealed an early topsoil. Such a prehistoric sequence rarely survives in greater London but had been preserved by levelling up to form the base for apparently domestic Early and Middle Iron Age occupation. These discoveries give weight to the hypothesis that there was a focus of prehistoric activity on a possible island in the Thames at Syon. Planned large-scale excavations offer an opportunity to establish the precise chronology for landscape evolution on the gravel terrace of the Wandle, a major tributary to the Thames in close proximity to the Late Bronze Age Downland enclosure at Queen Mary's Hospital. In the adjacent Hogsmill valley, a relatively long chronology of prehistoric and Roman settlement survives at Manor Farm, Old Malden, and of particular note is the discovery of 2 mesolithic flint axes within a context apparently securely dated to the Late Bronze Age, providing a remarkable example of late prehistoric curation of antiquities.
