Abstract
LEICESTER has saved her Roman remains. At a meeting of the City Council held on February 23, it was decided that the site of the Roman Forum, recently discovered in the course of the excavations carried out by Miss Kathleen Kenyon (see NATURE, 138, 356, 432) should be preserved as an open space for all time. As the site is centrally situated and had been chosen for the erection of municipal baths, it will be widely appreciated that the citizens of Leicester by this decision have shown a generous public spirit in their attitude towards the claims of the past and a consciousness of their obligation to the nation at large and to posterity, which is worthy of all praise. Of this monument, unique in Britain, the excavations have now proceeded to a point which reveals two sides of the Forum with one of the flanking streets; while it has been shown that the famous “Jewry Wall”, one of the largest pieces of Roman work in England, was part of the west wall of the basilica. In later times this became a place of Christian worship, and in the early medieval period the Jewry Wall itself was utilized as the west end of a church. Tiles and bricks from the Forum were used in the construction of the adjacent late Saxon church of St. Nicholas, itself one of the notable monuments of Leicester. It has been pointed out that in declaring that this area shall remain in perpetuity an open space, the Council preserves in the heart of the city “the veritable birth-place of her commerce, her self-government, and her religion”; but in fact it does even more. For Miss Kenyon in the course of her excavations has discovered traces of pre-Roman settlement, which may well go back to the original British village founded on the banks of the Soar. The City of Leicester is to be congratulated on a decision which will earn the gratitude of all who are interested in the preservation of such relics of the past.
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Roman Leicester. Nature 139, 404 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/139404a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/139404a0