Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

You're listening to our podcast that explores the history and stories of our six palaces.

These talks are a collection of some of our best live events.

I really hope you enjoy listening.

In the first of two talks on Richard the third, leading archaeologist

Dr Richard Buckley tells his story of the amazing discovery of the body of a king in a car park

in Leicester, England. The Greyfries project is one that I never for a moment expected to happen.

I had a phone call from Philippa Langley of the Richard III Society in about January 2011,

and she had this idea that we could dig up a car park in Leicester and hopefully find the remains of Richard III.

And as a fairly seasoned archaeologist

who had done lots of urban archaeology, I thought, well, there's no chance of that at all,

because it's an operational car park, most of it's built on. We don't know whether the king's still

there anyway. He may have been destroyed by later buildings, or he was perhaps dug up in the

16th century and thrown in the river as some of the historical accounts say.

But what was interesting was that Philippa had managed to get the year of very influential people in Leicester City Council,

particularly the chief executive, and it inspired the chief executive that this was a really good project.

And I think what attracted me to it really was the possibility of investigating a part of Lester's archaeology that's normally inaccessible, because most of what we do is connected with large-scale development. And where the grey fries lies in the city is an area where there are reasonably high quality buildings of the 18th and

19th centuries which are not likely to be demolished and redeveloped. So I think that was the

hook for me was to learn about Lester's archaeology and particularly the Greyfriars.

Philippa was optimistic from the very beginning and she wouldn't mind me saying this.

She was always glass half full, and I was always glass half empty.

And she was so convinced that they'd even done a design for the coffin.

...