ground-breaking work at Roman Circus House!

Today (25th April), as the sun has come out at last, we have ventured outside to start work on the Trust’s new external storage building at Roman Circus House, which is an exciting development. The storage building is where we will keep tools and our many boxes of pottery fragments. We have moved the bike shed and the storage building will include the original site of the shed. The great thing about the storage building is that it will significantly increase the space available on the ground floor of the main building for the circus interpretation centre.

Trust archaeologist Mark today started cutting the tarmac surface at the side of Roman Circus House with a floor saw. This is in preparation for hiring a machine to dig out the foundations of the storage building. To save money, we are going to tackle the first stages of construction ourselves – and not just digging out the foundations! We will dig the foundations, but we will also fill them with concrete and lay the concrete floor. A professional bricklayer will then lay the bricks and a roofer will construct the roof trusses and the roof. We will also undertake the archaeological monitoring of the site…

Local builders’ merchants Collier & Catchpole  (http://www.colliercatchpole.co.uk/) have very generously agreed to supply the bricks at a substantial discount to the Trust and also provide the other necessary materials such as sand, cement, lintels, damp-proof membrane, etc for free! We are extremely grateful to Collier & Catchpole for their generosity to the Trust.

There have also been essential works going on inside Roman Circus House today: Nick the electrician has been installing lights in the new lowered ceiling of the cafe servery while his friend sorted out the security lights.

The image shows Mark cutting the tarmac surface today.

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