The builders are sitting gossiping on a fence, the groaning man is back in the latrine and the unfortunate woman who has been pregnant for the last 10 years has been allowed to sit down: after 16 months and £4.3m, the Vikings of the Jorvik centre in York are back.
The attraction, a recreation of the houses and streets of Viking York situated where archaeologists excavated the real foundations, reopens to the public on Saturday after extensive flooding in December 2015 forced it to close.
Jorvik Viking Centre had been open for 32 years, and visited by 18 million people, when over Christmas 2015 it started to rain heavily. On 27 December, its director, Sarah Maltby, got a phone call while the centre was open and full of visitors warning her that water was beginning to trickle from the loading bay at the back of the building. She ordered immediate closure.
Within 24 hours every original artefact, down to tiny needles and pins, glass beads and gaming pieces, had been rescued and taken to the offices upstairs. By then residents were being rescued by boat from first-floor windows in the low-lying parts of the city, the mobile phone system and electricity supply had crashed, and down in the darkness the Vikings were sitting in chest-high water lapping through their recreated houses and streets.
The reopened centre will have new features and scenes. It will also have an expanded and improved museum section that can take loans from national collections – including an opening display of Viking weaponry from the British Museum. Two-thirds of the renovation and repair costs were met by insurance, the rest by extensive ongoing fundraising.
All the advance tickets for the opening weeks sold out long ago, purchased by Viking enthusiasts from as far away as the US and Australia. But there will be tickets on the door and Viking music to entertain the expected opening weekend queues.
Visitors will find the image of the Viking world has darkened, based on recent research. A blind story teller, speaking in Norse, conjures visions of pagan dragons and wolves from the ashes of his hearth, while in the neighbouring house a Christian priest gives the last rites to a dying woman. A woman leaning on a crutch is an isolated figure in the busy market street: her real skeleton, displayed in the nearby galleries, shows that congenital deformities must have left her in pain for most of her short life. The clenched fingers of the fisherman gutting his catch on the quay show that he too has an inherited condition that would have eventually made his hands useless.
The most sinister of the new figures are a smartly dressed man and a young woman, beside the ship unloading at the wharf: he is a slave trader, she is one of his latest commodities.
“We would never have wished this to happen, but it did give us the chance to look in detail at every aspect of what we were doing, and bring more richness and depth to the displays,” Maltby said.
In 1976 York Archaeological Trust began a planned six-month dig, as an old sweet factory was demolished to build the Coppergate shopping centre. The excavation continued for five years as objects poured out of the ground and they uncovered a buried Viking world, with timber buildings surviving to a height of two metres.
The finds included shoes, belts, knives, scabbards, jewellery, toys, tools, musical instruments, as well as a carefully repaired cooking pan and a patched sock, touching evidence of how valued objects were. There were bones of all the fish and other animals they ate. The excavation also unearthed the largest human coprolite (fossilised faeces) ever found, analysis of which revealed that it was produced by someone tormented by worms. Among the rarest finds were fragments of silk including a woman’s cap, made from a precious bolt of fabric imported along Viking trading routes from China or Iran.
The centre has also used the enforced break to digitise its entire archive, including thousands of photographs and drawings of the original excavation, as well as film including Betamax video. Many of the stories and images from the archive have been used in the introductory display, including the rookie police officer who fainted when he saw the first skeleton uncovered on the site and thought he had stumbled on his first murder case.
The ride that transported visitors through the centre survived in good condition, and has been restored with touchscreen interpretation and a choice of 14 languages. Many of the best loved features of the old displays are back – the rats, the cats, a few figures that survived such as the pregnant woman, and the famous smells. A mercifully light touch has been used in adding smells to a new scene, a slaughter yard awash with blood and guts.
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Jorvik Viking Centre, York, reopens 8 April.
