This volume is the second and final report on the Wroxeter hinterland project. The first was concerned with the effect of the military and later civilian populations at Wroxeter on the surrounding landscape and peoples, whereas this book is concerned with the city itself. The first part of the volume reports on some small-scale excavations undertaken in 1999 and 2008 but the principal interest lies in the Wroxeter atlas, an insula by insula presentation of the results of various geophysical surveys (principally interpretations of fluxgate magnetometry data) alongside a transcription of the stunning cropmark evidence captured by Arnold Baker and others since the mid-1950s. The composite plan of the aerial photographic evidence first published in 1993 marked nine buildings for which a public function could reasonably be inferred and 119 private ones. The programme of geophysics was designed to test the reliability of this image of a ‘garden city’, that is to say away from the municipal core a scattering of large houses surrounded by apparently empty space. Wroxeter was the pioneer site for the application of detailed geophysics to the entire available area of a major Romano-British town, and the approach has since been, or is currently being, applied to other greenfield sites such as Aldborough, Caistor-by-Norwich and Silchester.

As a result of the geophysical surveys the number of private buildings has been increased, with varying degrees of confidence, to 240, the majority of the newly discovered structures lying in the northern part of the town which appeared sparsely developed on the aerial photographs. Where the two sources of evidence show the same building the cropmarks usually provide the clearer plan. The authors attribute this to most of the private houses being built of timber sat on dwarf stone walls which therefore do not generate spreads of demolition rubble to obscure the wall lines. The presentation of the two sources of evidence side by side for each insula allows the reader to immediately recognise those locations where geophysical survey adds context to previously known cropmarks, and also to wonder how seemingly substantial structures can show in one plot but be invisible in another. The reasons for this disparity are not always obvious, to this reviewer at least. It is claimed that the magnetometer survey was able to detect evidence for an extensive urban fire, perhaps that represented by the forum gutter deposit of c. a.d. 165–75. The evidence for this potentially interesting observation is not presented in the report, although reference to an earlier article indicates that it rests on the identification of ‘reversed magnetic responses’ associated with stone buildings in Insulae II and III to the north-east of the forum. Some further discussion of the basis for this conclusion, and the reliability that can be placed upon it, would have been useful.

Upon consideration of the overall site plan (on which Insula XIX as it is referred to in the text is marked as IXX) one is struck by the seeming lack of emphasis on the street frontages in a number of insulae, the dominant structure lying in a central or off-centre location. Whether this is the true picture, or whether the frontages were occupied by timber structures which have largely eluded detection by remote sensing remains to be seen. The authors also note the concentration of high-status residences in the western part of the town, upwind of the lesser houses and doubtless smelly industrial activities in the northern and eastern parts of the city.

The final two chapters of the volume provide a chronological overview of the development of Wroxeter and a characterisation of the urban settlement. While an argued interpretation is proposed for most of the key points, most readers will doubtless concur with the authors that much of what we think we know about Wroxeter is in fact untested hypothesis. It is undoubtedly the remote sensing that is the strength of this volume and the authors are to be congratulated on what their bold and ambitious programme of geophysical surveys has told us about a provincial town in, as they term it, the back of beyond. The detailed referencing (and in some cases critique) of all previous work in each insula, and of the town as a whole, makes this volume the essential starting point for all future considerations of Wroxeter.