Colchester world heritage bid

Sunday 6th June 2010

The Pyramids, Great Wall of China, Stonehenge and...Colchester? The Essex town is preparing an audacious bid to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site – and it's not as unlikely as it sounds. Destination Colchester, a group of local business owners and heritage enthusiasts, is preparing a bid to be entered onto a tentative list of the UK's heritage sites. If the bid, due next Friday, is successful, Colchester could find itself inscribed alongside famous British landmarks like Bath Spa, Hadrian's Wall and the Tower of London.

Colchester has already been making headlines this year with a bid to preserve Britain's only known chariot racetrack, or circus. But while the campaign, which enlisted the help of famous faces such as historian Dan Cruickshank, reached its £200,000 target earlier this year, Destination Colchester member Bill Hayton thinks the city has undersold itself for too long. "We want to put Colchester on the map – it's been our intention for some time,” he says. “We are fed up with the way the town has failed to make the most of what it's got here. And when you stand back and look at what Colchester has, it is pretty extraordinary – yet very little-known outside the town."

Colchester is thought to be the first Roman town in the UK, called Camulodunum. Replacing an already thriving Iron Age community, the city boasts Britain's oldest and longest Roman wall, its first Roman church, two theatres, a temple of Claudius – on which Colchester Castle sits today – and the circus. It was also where Celtic queen Boudicca began her bloody revolt, burning the city to the ground. Despite an illustrious Medieval history, the bid's organisers are focusing solely on Colchester's Iron Age and Roman era. "We think we have an amazing assemblage of Roman and pre-Roman sites in the town," adds Hayton. "It's the fusing of Roman and pre-Roman cultures...when you look at the whole landscape, you can see it's a very large-scale settlement."