the circus super-model is looking great!

Today (4th June), Trust volunteer Shirley brought the circus super-model to Roman Circus House. The super-model will be here for a few days, as it is going to be filmed by a BBC TV crew on Saturday – so Shirley will get a few days off! She has been working on the super-model at home for several months now, assisted by her husband John. After Saturday, however, Shirley will take the super-model home again to work on it some more.

The circus super-model is looking great. It is still in sections, and it will only be finally combined when all the parts are finished; then it will be fixed to its plinth and it will be the central element of the circus display in the Roman circus centre. The structure of the model now includes the 3d-printed starting-gates and magistrate’s box, the ceremonial entrance arch and the pulvinar, where devotional objects were displayed during events at the circus, which were held on religious festival days. At a scale of 1:100, the model is 4.5 metres long. The model is now extensively painted – all minutely and by hand – and is just awaiting some more architectural details, the central barrier, and its external buttresses, as well as several thousand tiny spectators… Shirley has spent many hours working on the super-model, to detailed plans supplied by Trust director Philip, and everyone here was thrilled to see the model today.

It was, altogether, a very busy day at Roman Circus House today, with a full house of renovation volunteers, archaeology volunteers and our own model-making volunteer, as well as some visitors, archaeologists who were working indoors, and a team of volunteers from the Essex Society for Archaeology and History (ESAH), who were here to do the mailout of their annual journal, the Transactions of the Society (volume 3, 2012).

This week is also National Volunteers’ Week (1st-7th June): ‘… Volunteers’ Week is an annual celebration of the fantastic contribution millions of volunteers make across the UK – and it’s taking place from the 1-7 June 2014 … [it] is a time to say thank you to volunteers, but of course it’s not the only time to say thank you to volunteers… ‘. Visit the Volunteers’ Week web-site at http://volunteersweek.org/ .

With many thanks to Shirley and John, to Roger Massey Ryan who is 3d-printing the architectural details of the circus model and, of course, to all our dedicated volunteers for all their hard work.

The images show Shirley with the super-model in the large room of the circus centre today, and a biscuit tin full of buttresses (the buttresses of the circus were of different sizes) …

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