On the south side of the Tyne, where the mouth of the river rushes to meet the North Sea, lies the town of South Shields. In the late nineteenth century, it was a busy jumble of factories, foundries, docks and slums topped by a commanding land promontory known as the Lawe. At that time little more than a collection of scrubby fields used for grazing, and intersected by a ballast railway, it was also long known in antiquarian circles to have been the site of a ‘Roman station’. In the 1870s, however, a change in the leasehold terms for the land made it newly attractive to developers, and almost as soon as their teams of workmen set to clearing it for the terraces which were to be built, material traces of the town's Roman past began to emerge. The People's Roman Remains Park, taking its title from the archaeological park which opened on the site in 1881, is a thoughtfully constructed account of the context and legacy of the excavation conducted at South Shields in 1875, not omitting the discreditable wrangling over the fate of the site in the aftermath.

Chapter 1 sets the scene. In a Victorian boomtown ‘on the up’, the re-discovery of Roman remains on the Lawe lit the touch-paper on something of a Tutankhamun moment for local businesses; and the Roman past of South Shields became the focus of its new civic identity.

Chapter 2 explores the history of the site, and the family background of Robert Blair, a local solicitor prominently involved in the excavation. Blair later compiled a ‘Scrapbook’ documenting the episode, which survives, and has provided much of this book's raw material.

Chapter 3 describes the carefully orchestrated campaign to seek permission for the excavation, and then to raise the necessary funds. The prime movers behind the scheme performed an effective double act: the educator and social reformer Robert Hooppell was undoubtedly the brains, while Robert Blair lent it a more popular public face.

Chapter 4 focuses on the excavation itself, and the sponsorship of John Collingwood Bruce, the great nineteenth-century publiciser of Hadrian's Wall. Kidd discusses the questions which particularly exercised the investigators at the time, and the evolving interpretations of structures they found. The designation of a ‘forum’, for instance, very much reflected the contemporary urban context of South Shields, as well as a knowledge of the excavated remains at Pompeii (p. 95). It also reminds us how little was known about the layout of Roman forts until later excavations were conducted.

The subject of Chapter 5 is the power of artefacts and funerary monuments from the site to conjure the realities of the people involved in the Roman empire, and to find echoes of this cosmopolitan period in the history of South Shields in its more recent past.

Chapter 6 focuses on Robert Blair's antiquarian career, and the Scrapbook he compiled of the discoveries on the Lawe – another artefact of the excavation, in effect. High-quality reproductions of his sketches and drawings from the album, both in this section and throughout, help communicate some of the actual excitement of leafing through the beautiful (but also dauntingly large) tome.

Chapter 7 documents the reluctance on the part of the Corporation of South Shields to spend the money necessary to consolidate the Roman remains, resulting in a half-hearted attempt to display the fruits of the excavation in a new museum and a long-running dispute over the preservation of the site on the Lawe.

Chapter 8 is of particular interest, reflecting on both the local legacy of the episode and changing attitudes to ‘heritage’. The final section of the book includes a usable index, a bibliography, and a short but helpful list of places to visit.

In conclusion, The People's Roman Remains Park recalls a defining episode in the history of South Shields. The book is an amalgam of the unique evidence of Blair's Scrapbook and an impressive collection of supporting documents and photographs, beautifully reproduced. It offers an enjoyable and well organised re-telling of the story, with the emphasis on the main characters involved in the events of 1875, but does not shy away from the darker tale of apathy and incompetence (and vested interests, of course) which prevented the town from turning its historical legacy to immediate good effect. It should particularly be commended for this. Arbeia, South Shields Roman Fort benefits from all profits from the sale of the book, which seems sure to succeed in the aim of its authors ‘to ignite further interest in the town's spectacular Roman remains and artefacts’.