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The idea of a guidebook is an ancient one – Pausanias’ Guide to Greece is perhaps the first – but these days the idea of wandering around sites clutching a book conveying detailed information might be thought to be superfluous for a digital age. Books, however, have a real advantage – they don’t need batteries or connectivity – so they will always have a role. Writing a good guidebook, however, is hard to do – how much detail to include, and which sites to pick? From the outset, Richard Hingley, a prolific and energetic author and researcher of the province, makes it clear that this is a personal but not comprehensive selection of the towns of Roman Britain. Some omissions can be accounted for by technicalities – Chester is a fortress, not a town – but others (Carlisle, for instance) could be argued to have a stronger case for inclusion than, say, Bath, which, as acknowledged, has neither a street grid to speak of nor a forum. (Carlisle does appear in the supporting website for the book, a resource worth consulting.) This, I suspect, gets us to the heart of the matter, for this is a guidebook for a contemporary, largely unacademic audience, one that expects to see Bath in such a book because it is a World Heritage Site but also realises that you don’t need a wealth of information about each site because, as is stated at the end of each entry, there is plenty of digital info out there to back up what we’re told about the archaeology.
The real strengths of the book thus lie in its sheer practicality – what street names to look out for, or corners to turn, when following the lines of the town’s walls, for instance – and in its even-handed treatment of all the sites through following the same, basic, pared-down format and easy-to-follow illustrations. To achieve that alone is worthy of note given how much has been written about these sites. An enjoyable, and useful, read worthy of any bookshelf but (more importantly) one to be packed and used when you visit these sites.
REVIEW BY ROGER H WHITE
Roman Britain in Twenty Towns: a visitor’s guide
Richard Hingley
Bloomsbury Academic, £19.99
ISBN 978-1350520110
