Visiting Roman Towns

I am currently part way through writing a visitor’s guide to Roman towns in Britain for Bloomsbury. What inspired me to write this book? I have long been interested in the Roman past, but also have a deep interest in the Iron Age. So many of our Roman towns have significant origins in the Iron Age. I explored this in my earlier book, also published by Bloomsbury, Londinum: A biography (2018). London has usually been viewed as a Roman creation, but I argued that this misses the significance of the Thames-side location at which Londinium was to develop before the Romans arrived in Britain. So many of our Roman towns originated at locations that were significant meeting points during the Iron Age.

            My interest in this issue derives from my childhood interest in archaeology. I grew up living half a mile north of an important temple site at Frilford (or Marcham), seven miles south of Oxford. When I was at primary school, the teachers took us to visit an excavation at this site which helped spark my interest in the Iron Age and Roman past. This eventually led to me becoming a Professor of Roman Archaeology at Durham University. Earlier in my life, however, I had discovered and partly excavated a Roman theatre at this significant location in south Oxfordshire. This was subsequently more fully excavated by Garry Lock and Chris Gosden of Oxford University (https://projects.arch.ox.ac.uk/VRP1.html). The location of this theatre in 1982 caused me to be fascinated by the idea of identifying the Iron Age origins of Roman sites. The site at Frilford was a rural sanctuary not a Roman town, but many sanctuaries and towns developed from places that had been important for meetings during the Iron Age. The need for a theatre at the rural site at Frilford resulted from the long tradition of meeting there.

            I am carrying through this perspective in my exploration of twenty of the towns of Roman Britain. These are the colonies and civitas capitals at which the most impressive remains are displayed to the public. This includes sites such as Verulamium, Silchester, Wroxeter and Aldborough. The writing is well underway and the book should be published in around two years. It aims to guide visitors around what they can see at each town and to direct people to know where to look for information.

Richard Hingley is Emeritus Professor of Roman Archaeology at Durham University, UK. He is the author of Hadrian's Wall: A Life (2012), Londinium: A Biography (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) and Conquering the Ocean: The Roman Invasion of Britain (2022). https://richardhingley1.wordpress.com/