This report is a monument to persistence. The sites were excavated in advance of development between 1968 and 1971, with the bulk of the post-excavation analysis completed in 1985–87. Hurst's energy and continuing fascination with Gloucester fully 50 years later is remarkable, and if he can summon further reserves to achieve a similar outcome for his remaining substantive site, Berkeley Street, then that will be a singular achievement. Hurst was a young man when appointed as the sole professional archaeologist in Gloucester in 1968, and he has maintained his interest in this provincial city throughout a career that led him to excavate in both Carthage and Rome. A mature and informed perspective on the findings shines through this report, in which equal attention is devoted to the Roman, post-Roman, late Saxon and medieval evidence.

The principal discovery of the forum is already familiar to students of Roman Britain through an interim account published in 1972 and subsequent reflections in print, but we now have the full detail. The excavations were very limited in extent due to the meagre resources available, and the irreplaceable loss of information on the archaeology of Gloucester caused by the development is a sobering backdrop. At least that unsustainable situation has improved for the better over the last half century. In outline, the sequence revealed was a series of ditches and trenches of irregular plan, followed by a timber building and then one with stone foundations, the latter to be rebuilt in more substantial masonry. The early gullies seem to be contemporary with the occupation of the vexillation fortress at Kingsholm, and the quantity of finds suggests a reasonable period of occupation. But the pottery from these features is of a quite different character from that recovered from the Kingsholm Close site (more imports at the latter; more ‘native’ and Severn Valley wares in the gullies). This disparity would repay further analysis. Analogy with places such as Exeter and Inchtuthil suggests that additional installations contemporary with the Kingsholm fortress are highly likely. The extent of the gullies is not yet established, and future work could well show that they lay within a defended circuit that pre-dates the city-centre legionary fortress.

The timber building is presumably the principia of the legionary fortress, although the traces revealed were fragmentary in the extreme, but the first stone building could be either the principia associated with a second period of military occupation in the late a.d. 80s (as Hurst favours) or the forum of the colonia founded in the reign of either Domitian or Nerva. The excavated evidence does not assist this debate, which is only likely to be resolved by the examination of a barrack block on a reasonable scale. Hurst provides a plausible architectural reconstruction of the rebuilt masonry forum, with the open-fronted basilica accessed by steps leading up from the paved courtyard. A significant discovery within the courtyard was a plinth for a twice-life-size equestrian statue, evidenced by fragments of cut-up bronze from a late Roman deposit. It was surely of an imperial subject. The post-Roman fate of the forum is instructive. Above the latest use deposit in the courtyard was a 0.3 m-thick, artefact-free, sandy loam, a natural deposit that formed within the bowl formed by the collapse and robbing of structures on all four sides of the plaza. The stump of an alder tree growing in the top of the loam produced a broadly ninth- or tenth-century radiocarbon date, and the loam suggests a lack of significant human activity, in this part of the city at least, in the post-Roman period. The loam sealed the eroded remnants of a resurfacing of the courtyard which could have been in that state by the mid-fourth century, although the demolition and robbing of the structures may have occurred later.

The volume also includes a consideration of the evidence for the monumental colonnade recorded on a number of separate occasions in Westgate Street. Hurst reverts to an interpretation that the columns defined the aisles of a baths basilica rather than the surround of a temple precinct. On his reconstruction the baths basilica would have been of very considerable size.

Naturally, the excavations reported in this volume show their age in terms of the application of archaeological science, yet in terms of the detail of recording and a balanced consideration of the ambiguities in interpretation inevitable when excavating in restricted trenches, Hurst's work stands muster with that conducted nowadays. One is left to reflect on what circumstances might lead to future investigation of the forum on anything but the smallest scale, given the depth the remains are buried and modern conservation policies. Many of the questions posed in this report are unlikely to be answered for decades to come.