The Thames is England’s longest archaeological landscape and thousands of the objects that fill our museums have come from its foreshore. Among them are numerous Bronze and Iron Age swords, shields and spears that were found along the stretch between Vauxhall and Teddington and include the famous Battersea Shield.

Around the middle of the eighth century, c. 750, a Swedish maritime expedition came to violent grief on or near the island of Saaremaa off the coast of Estonia. We know this because of the chance discoveries from 2008 to 2012 of two boats full of dead warriors, buried by the seashore in what is now the village of Salme. They had been set up paralle

The unfinished battle scenes turned out to be two of the most influential lost paintings in history, and they helped to shape the High Renaissance. “These battle cartoons of Leonardo and Michelangelo are the turning point of the Renaissance,” according to Kenneth Clark.34 They were kept on display in Florence until 1512, and young artists flocked t