Colchester was, of course, of much greater importance than London at first and we have recently discovered the most impressive roman circus anywhere in Europe which means that hundreds if not thousands of people would have travelled many miles to attend the games here, and pieces of a roman board game were discovered in a fairly recent excavation which a friend has researched enough to come up with a modern version which, thanks to him, you can have a go at playing at events in Colchester. I gather it somewhat resembles chess so you probably need to be quite good at maths and logic.

I shall have to do a bit of research to see if we have discovered any hairdressing artefacts, I bet we have got some somewhere. At the moment my son is searching for a well near us at our shop in the town centre as it could be that we have the first roman basilica in Colchester, the remains of a building that would fit a basilica have been found in the town centre and a well at the eastern end would be more proof. All of this is work in progress and I only mention it to prove how proud we are of Colchester’s history which is often overlooked in favour of London. Not only do we have the circus but we have the best preserved roman gateway at Balkerne Gate, most of the wall (built after Boudicca’s destruction of the town), the foundations of the Temple of Claudius and its surrounding colonnade, a theatre, a street plan on the roman grid system, and the many, many finds which can now be seen in our Castle Museum, plus of course the wonderful mosaics one of which can now be seen in the Firstsite Art Gallery.

London is great but the first romans on these shores settled in Colchester and it was, and still is, Britain’s First City!

Pauline.