Investigator Claims Discovery of King Alfred's Remains Under Hampshire Car Park Grave Site

Investigator Graham Phillips claims to have located the long-lost remains of King Alfred the Great beneath a car park in Hampshire. The Anglo-Saxon ruler is celebrated as one of England's most significant figures, renowned for defending Wessex against Viking invasions and establishing the groundwork for a unified nation. Despite his historical prominence, the exact location of his burial site has remained uncertain for centuries.

Over the past hundred years, numerous expeditions have attempted to pinpoint Alfred's resting place without success. Now, after a 13-year search, Phillips asserts he has finally found the grave. He notes that the discovery shares a peculiar similarity with the findings surrounding Richard III, stating, "Bizarrely, like Richard III, the bones are under a car park."

Alfred was born in 849 and reigned until his death in 899 of unknown causes. His remains were originally interred at Winchester Cathedral before being moved to Hyde Abbey in 1110, where they lay between those of his wife and son. However, the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539 led to the abbey's demolition, leaving the site in ruins.

In 1866, during construction work for a nearby workhouse, antiquarian John Mellor excavated the area and believed he had found Alfred's bones. Consequently, they were reburied at St. Bartholomew's Church. This situation changed in 2013 when archaeologists exhumed those remains and carbon-dated them; the results showed they dated from over 200 years after Alfred's death, prompting Phillips to initiate his own investigation.

Phillips explained his motivation: "Whoever's bones they were, they weren't Alfred's. So, I decided to discover what happened to them. The quest has taken me 13 years."

With the belief that the original bones had been lost during the 1860s workhouse construction, Winchester city council converted the Hyde Abbey site into a garden, marking the presumed locations of the king and his family with stone slabs. Phillips, however, argues that the remains were moved earlier than previously thought. He cited evidence suggesting that in 1788, a prison was constructed adjacent to the area, causing the grave site to be repurposed as a garden for the warden's residence.

Phillips is convinced the original bones were relocated during this period in the late 1700s. Historical records indicate that English historian Henry Howard visited Richard Page, the warden responsible for the work at Hyde Abbey, to obtain plans of the ruins existing before the prison was built. Phillips believes these historical documents hold the key to understanding why the remains were not where history expected them to be.

While Phillips was hunting through the archives at Cambridge University for a specific copy of a plan, he stumbled upon what he terms an astonishing discovery. He explained that Howard had previously penned an article regarding Hyde Abbey, which appeared in Volume 13 of Archaeologia, the publication of the London Society of Antiquaries, back in 1800. Within that text, Howard noted that prisoners working to landscape the warden's new garden unearthed bones and reburied them in a nearby location; notably, Howard included a map detailing this activity. The precise location is scheduled to be unveiled for the first time during a new episode of the British television series Weird Britain, airing on Blaze TV this Wednesday, July 8, 2026, at 9pm.