A guided stroll around Sunny Colch

This post also features on the delightful Colchester Chronicle

I’ve either lived, studied or worked in Sunny Colch for almost all of my life. Whilst I could happily point you in the direction of the finest watering hole (The Brickies, Bergholt Road) or the highlight of the cultural calendar (Colchester Beer Festival. I sense a theme developing…) I couldn’t tell you much about its history, beyond something to do with the Romans.

An attempt to remedy this myself and my dear wife chalked our names up for a Walking Tour through the excellent Visit Colchester interweb site.

Our tour guide, Anne, was superb. I doubt there could have been a finer way to look afresh at buildings and roads I’ve walked along for years.

Below are some of my favourite facts from our walk this morning. No doubt some of them may be familiar to many, but they’re enjoyable nonetheless:

• Camulodunum is not a ‘Roman’ name, its an adaptation of the original name for the town — Camulodunon. The name comes from Camulus, the God of War of the Trinovantes, who were the 'original’ inhabitants of Sunny Colch.
  
  
• Colchester was probably one of the first places in the UK to encounter an Elephant. The Roman Emperor Claudius brought them ashore when he originally laid siege and conquerered the town in AD 43.
  
  
• Firstsite/The VAF/Golden Goose/Bronze Banana is one of the finest buildings our town has to offer.
  
  
• The lovely shops towards the top of Eld Lane which look like houses were originally houses. Alms Houses.
  
  
• West and East Stockwell Street get their name from a well at their bottom which provided water for livestock to drink whilst being driven to market.
  
  
• The tiny door way you can see on Holy Trinity Church from Trinity Street is called the 'Devil’s Door’. It was built so that the devil, unleashed by the cries of child being baptised, wouldn’t be able to open its wings and escape.
  
  
• The narrow, terracotta bricks you see on many of Colchester’s oldest buildings are actually Roman Bricks, which are similar in size and shape to a small paving slab. As the town grew they were 'recycled’ for new building projects.
  
  
• The building currently housing Superdry in Culver Square used be the town library, and was requisitioned in the Second World War. The entire Culver Square precinct was built on top of the Roman Barracks, and remnants of Boudica’s famous ramapage were found in the form of charred earth when building started.
  
  
• The Arts Centre lost the top of its tower when it was shelled in the Civil War. An unfortunate chap named 'One Eyed Gunner Thompson’ and his 'egg shaped cannon’ were also lost, one of the possible origins of the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme.
  
  
• Balkerne Gate is no named after it was Balked (filled in) once the Romans left.
  
  
• The parade of shops at the top of the high street are housed in the old Fire Station. The entire outside of the building is made of iron, just to make sure it couldn’t be burnt down…
  
  
• The building which currently houses Pizza Express used to be an agricultural showroom in the 19th Century, hence the huge glass windows.
  
  
• The Dutch Quarter should actually be called the Flemish Quarter. Most of the weavers who came to Colchester weren’t from Holland, they were from Belgium.
  
  
• Jumbo is still very beautiful, even from close up. This was the closest I’d ever gotten to it, and catching sight of it as I pull into North Station will be even sweeter having been close up to the old thing.
  
  
• The Town Hall Tower is called the Victoria Tower and is topped by a statue of St. Helena, facing in the direction of Jerusalem. The ravens sat around her are a symbol of the Hythe Port, and the figures around the middle of the tower symbolise the main sources of prosperity for Colch — agriculture, the military and fishing.
  
  

The most exciting find for me on the whole tour was St. Martins, the church found along West Stockwell Street. The Church looks tiny from the outside but is deliciously peaceful and rather large inside. One of the most interesting features was a 'squint’ — a portal cut through the wall so that the poorer members of the congregation could see the action.

The tours run most weekends and ours took slightly longer than the 90 minutes (we were a chatty bunch). You can find out more and book here. Get yourself along when you can, it’ll leave you with a feeling that you’ve scratched a bit deeper into the surface of our little old town.



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