The excavation took place during the summer of 1994 and was designed to examine only those parts of the site due to be affected by a proposed redevelopment. Evaluation in 1992 had suggested that Roman structures survived well at a depth of over a metre, so the new development was designed to cause a minimum of damage to these levels. There was little evidence for later use of the site until the eighteenth century. As a result, we focused on remains of relatively recent date.
The detailed cartographic evidence that exists from 1795 onwards shows that from the 1850s until 1939, the northern part of the site was occupied by part of a slum. It was originally known as Herbert’s Yard, later becoming Herbert’s Court to avoid confusion with an identically-named court elsewhere in the city. It was rather grandly renamed Cathcart Square around 1929, perhaps as part of an attempt to make the place sound ‘nicer’ than it actually was! The southern part of the site had been terraced cottages with individual yards during the same period. They had been built either side of a Baptist chapel established in 1806. When the chapel was demolished in 1915, a photographic laboratory was built on that part of the site and was extended westwards in 1956, over the site of the former terraced cottages.
The courtyard and terrace were demolished in January 1939 as part of a slum clearance programme. The Princess Street Clearance Area, as this part of Chester became known, had been an area of high-density poor-quality housing with little or no sanitation. Families from the courtyards which dominated this area were moved out to the newly built council houses on an estate at Lache, and the demolition area was converted to use as car parking.
Ironically, excavations took place on the site of the newly-demolished Cathcart Square, locating the enigmatic Roman building that led to the formulation of our project design. This building, which was originally (but wrongly) thought to be a theatre, is the so-called ‘Elliptical Building’, a monument that appears to be unique in the whole Roman Empire.