If you like mosaics in general, one of the best collections in the world is the Hatay Archaeology Museum in Antakya, Turkey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatay_Archaeology_Museum
Good, on the way down to Sicily, make a stop at Ravenna:
https://www.ravennamosaici.it/en/ravenna-is-the-only-one/
(often called "the city of mosaics")
When you're amongst the ruins you can hear the tube trains going past behind the walls.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/lidl-viking...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtain_Theatre
[1] https://www.thestageshoreditch.com/discover/history-heritage
Oops, we need to stop construction for some indefinite amount of find while archeologists clean and move a giant section of the ground.
I have absolutely no problem with them being required to cope with this themselves. There's a lot of history there and with the density of development in that area, there is really only one chance, each time, to do something about it.
For most developers this is priced in -- including when it's a state-sponsored project.
All around the UK there are plots of land that developers have acquired at an attractive price through sketchy regional development corporations, then gone bust (only to reemerge without debt) and the sites left as great big holes in the ground. In the town where I live there is a site that has been like this for two decades; it's gone through several developers, more than a couple of which had rather beneficial terms.
Major developers do not care when they walk out on a site if it is mildly inconvenient or not quite profitable enough; the least standard they should be held to is to pay for the costs of preserving our past when the site they have secured will ultimately make them a fortune as they lease off square footage to shady foreign investors!
Except from their accounts, or their AGM, since many of them are PLCs.
I'm struggling to think of a London-based property developer that has gone bust solely on the basis of their London portfolio. It would be quite unusual.
The closest I can think of is Targetfollow, which went into (and emerged from) administration, but that happened because they were nationally overstretched; the impact was felt more the further you got from London.
We might see this happen as a result of pandemic influences on property uses, but I doubt it.
> Presumably there are many who will advocate burdening developers with the cost of their own preservation aspirations while, at the same time, lamenting the lack of affordable housing due to the high cost of development.
You set this up like it's an either-or, but it's not. The high cost of development in London has basically nothing to do with the risk of finding a mosaic.
Hmm. They make an absolute fortune but abandon sites that aren't profitable?
This happens again and again and again.
(I don't know the specifics of UK antiquities, but a general argument of "they should just suck it up and do the right thing" has this general flaw.)
Which I concede you can make a strong argument the UK is doing its best to step away from.
The building trade in the UK isn't that kind of corrupt anymore; it's gone meta.
I suppose you could attempt to fix it by compensating the developer with government money, but it's not obvious to me how anyone would calculate that amount fairly and uncontroversially.
Why isn't there a flat tax on all development (or the populace even) to cover this? like you said, it's "our past", why should only developers foot the bill?
I'm always a bit surprised at people expressing incredulity that the state (which definitively controls the right to decide who gets to own land) hands out responsibilities with privileges.
There are all sorts of burdens and responsibilities, financially and otherwise, that fall on land owners and developers. This is just one of them. It's unusual but it's not outrageous.
so, why does that matter? What has that got to do with discovered artefacts?
Developers would make a profit off the land if nothing was discovered there.
Farmers also make profit off the land without any building required.
> There are all sorts of..
I'm not sure where you are going with this, I wasn't questioning the role of the state or that it "hands out responsibilities with privileges" - so it's kind of weird that you'd argue in the abstract like this. I'm arguing that there's no privilege for developers - discovered items are national assets and cannot be owned in many places.
Perhaps because they are the ones who would make the profit from what is surely a national asset. It's not as if they create the land that they make a profit from.
In some countries you get to deal with fun things like the town threatening to tear down your grandparents house because it was no longer attached to a farm, long after everything else around it was converted to a residential area. No need for researchers to fuck you over.
Julius Caesar came, saw, conquered, went away /
'Cause it rained here all the time /
Too many sniffs and colds /
Got up his Roman nose /
So he left it all behind for Eric the gardener to find
-- The Divine Comedy