Yiewsley Stadium

Yiewsley (/ˈjuːzli/ YOOZ-lee) is a large suburban village in the London Borough of Hillingdon. It is situated 2 miles (3 km) south of Uxbridge, the borough's commercial and administrative centre. Yiewsley was a chapelry in the ancient parish of Hillingdon, Middlesex. The population of the Yiewsley ward was recorded as 12,979 in the 2011 Census.

History

Stone Age

Lower and Middle Palaeolithic

Within the brickearth and gravels deposited by the Thames significant quantities of early human tools were found when commercial excavations began in Yiewsley on an industrial scale in the 19th century. The first person to start collecting artifacts from Yiewsley was John Allen Brown (1833-1903) a Fellow of the Geological Society who collected between 1889 and 1901. The principle collector was Robert Galloway Rice (1852-1933), a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries who recorded over 2600 items from the Yiewsley area between approximately 1905 and 1929. In 1937 his collection of Lower Palaeolithic and Middle Palaeolithic artifacts was donated to the Museum of London.

In his 1978 Archaeological Report, Early Man in West Middlesex, The Yiewsley Palaeolithic sites, Palaeontologist Desmond Collins states the following with regard to the archaeological significance of the Yiewsley sites:

“.the Yiewsley pits have yielded one of the largest series of Lower Palaeolithic stone hand tools in Europe and the area remains one of the richest Palaeolithic sites in Britain.”

“A feature unique to Yiewsley is the presence in a higher level of stone tools of a Middle palaeolithic (Mousterian) date, isolated for the first time, and indicating occupation during the Neanderthal period some 70,000 years ago – a period of man’s development otherwise poorly represented in the archaeology of Britain”

Bronze Age

In 1913–1914, there was the discovery of a Bronze Age urnfield cemetery with the excavation of 14 Deverel-Rimbury cinerary u