Almost 2,000 years ago, Viroconium Cornoviorum – known to us as Wroxeter – was the fourth-largest public city in Roman Britain, equivalent in area to Pompeii. The Shropshire site has played an influential role in the study of urbanism in the Roman period since the first excavations took place there in the 1850s (see CA 338 for a summary of past investigations). The modern village, which lies 7.5km (4.7 miles) south-east of Shrewsbury, sits within the walls of the long-since abandoned Roman city, today a Scheduled Monument whose visible remains – which consist of its ramparts, as well as the exposed ruins of its public baths and a reconstructed townhouse – are cared for as a visitor attraction managed by English Heritage. Now new geophysical surveys and archaeological excavations at the Shropshire site have revealed stunning evidence for the earliest chapters in the history of this important urban centre.
Our project focused on the site of Wroxeter Farm, located close to the crossroads of the city’s main streets – the cardo (which ran north–south and here is formed by Watling Street) and the decumanus (which ran east–west) – and opposite the forum-basilica (marketplace and town hall) and the main public baths. Despite this prominent position, however, almost nothing was known about the buildings located in this part of the city centre, which is covered by the structures and paddocks of a disused Victorian farm that was built around 1850 and declared redundant in 1999. The work that we carried out in 2024 has completely changed this picture, identifying a monumental roadside building that once stood opposite the forum-basilica; an extensive enclosed space that seems to have been empty except for a single small masonry building, perhaps a shrine or a funerary monument; a bath-suite associated with a large townhouse (one room of which contained a beautiful mosaic); and hints of possible votive activity. Before we dig deeper into these new discoveries, however, let’s explore what was already known about the city to which they belonged.
Setting the scene
Following the explorations of 19th-century antiquarians, Wroxeter saw further archaeological campaigns before and after the First World War. Then, after the Second World War, the site was the location of two of Roman Britain’s largest and most significant excavations, when Graham Webster and Philip Barker of the University of Birmingham investigated the area of the public baths, the adjacent macellum (covered market), and the remains of the legionary fortress that lies beneath the later city (see CA 14, 25, 39, 75, and 112). These research and training excavations took place from 1955 to 1990, and hundreds of students and archaeologists (including two authors of this article) worked with these two distinguished, and presumably extraordinarily patient, scholars of Roman Britain.
