Richard Buckley
RICHARD BUCKLEY, FORMER DIRECTOR OF ULAS, TALKING ABOUT THE FIRST APPROACH FROM PHILIPPA LANGLEY
"It was a sort of dismal January morning…. and I remember our administrator shouting across to me that there's a lady on the phone wants to look into digging up the remains of Richard III. And I think my initial reaction inwardly was, "Oh No!", you know, we've heard it all before, yes, people, people think we can just drop everything and go and do some interesting projects. But when I got talking to her, what was really interesting was, was she'd done her background research. And it struck me that it would be really interesting to learn more about the Greyfriars site, because my first excavation when I was still at school, was the Austin Friars by West Bridge..."
JOHN FLORANCE, FORMER RADIO LECIESTER PRESENTER, TALKING TO RICHARD BUCKLEY ABOUT THE DIG
"Sometime before all of that happened, I had a conversation with Richard Buckley. He was the archaeologist at Leicester University, and he sort of let drop that they got funding to do some archaeology in that area. And he said it's… I can remember him saying it's to find Richard III, but I don't think for a moment we're going to find Richard III. But he said, what is…. What I'm really looking forward to on the quiet is doing some archaeology on the old Leicester Greyfriars priory, because we don't know very much about that."
RICHARD BUCKLEY, FORMER DIRECTOR OF ULAS, TALKING ABOUT PHILIPPA LANGLEY'S POWERS OF PERSUASION
"The site was occupied by Social Services department, but Philippa managed to get the ear of the then Chief Executive, Sheila Locke, who was attracted by the idea, which I thought, you know, if I'd gone to them and said, "I want to destroy your car park on this wild goose chase for an unachievable project", they'd have said "No", so fair play to her for getting them to agree, so that, yes, they agreed to that."
RICHARD BUCKLEY, FORMER DIRECTOR OF ULAS, TALKING ABOUT HIS LOW EXPECTATIONS OF SUCCESS
"So, I was on holiday in August, in France, with some friends, and they were chatting to me about what we were up to. And I said, oh well, this is, you know, there's this project in Leicester which doesn't really stand any chance of success, so watch this space, sort of thing!"
SIR PETER SOULSBY, CITY MAYOR, TALKING ABOUT THE FIRST APPROACH TO DIG THE CAR PARK
"I do recall that our then Chief Operating Officer, Andy Keeling, came to see me and said they're wanting to dig in the Greyfriars car park. And I readily agreed, just because I thought, you know, bit of fun. I mean, seriously, it wasn't much, it wasn't much more than that."
