|
|
|
ESSEX DOGS Colchester, located in the English county of Essex lays claim to being Britain's oldest recorded town, it is also of course, the place where three-fourths of Blur (Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon and Dave Rowntree) were raised. The band, in the past, have been none-to complimentary about their former home-town. As budding young musicians and artists at Stanway Comprehensive School, Graham and Damon were often singled out for ridicule for being such. |  |
|
Says Graham: "When I was at school, we were asked to bring in photos of what people thought of Colchester and everyone just brought in pictures of men digging holes. I took pictures of gravestones...it's death for young people, this place." The feircely conservative traits of Colchester life was the inspiration for Damon's 'Essex Dogs' track on the 'blur' album, a bleak dank commentary on Colchester life. The bands keen-ness to critique the town of their adolescence was inevitably, widely reported and lambasted by the towns local gazette. |
|
A BRIEF HISTORY The English town of Colchester is steeped in a long and sometimes glorious history. In AD77 a Roman writer by the name of Pliny the Elder described the location of the Isle of Anglesey as being 'about 200 miles from Camulodunum, a town in Britain'. This was the Roman name for Colchester and is the earliest known reference to a fixed settlement in Britain, hence the claim to be Britain's oldest recorded town. Colchester was founded on the River Colne in the county of Essex. If history had turned out differently, Colchester could have been the capital of England instead of London. Indeed, at the time of Queen Boudica in AD60, it was the capital, although its name then was Camulodunum. When the Roman Empire invaded Britain in AD43 they made the capture of Camulodunum one of their main priorities. They quickly subdued the local defenders and built a fortress at the settlement. By AD49 the Romans mistakenly thought they had nothing to fear from the local tribes and the fortress became a civilian settlement populated mainly by retired soldiers and their families. It was named Colonia Claudia in honour of the Emperor, the first capital of the Roman Province Britannia. In AD54 Claudius died and the Romans built the Temple of Claudius to worship his memory. However they made the mistake of heavily taxing the local Britains and using many of them as slaves in order to build the monument. They also forced the locals to worship there. This made the temple an object of great hatred amongst the local people and a symbol of the hate they felt for Rome. In AD60 Prasutagus, the Iceni king, died without a son to succeed him. The Romans refused to recognise Boudica and his daughters as heirs and instead assaulted the women. This was to ignite a revolt which led to the destruction of the Roman town at Colchester, and also later those at St. Albans and London. Boudica and the Iceni formed an alliance with another tribe the Trinovantes and attacked the now civilian town of Colchester. |
 | The colonial residents took refuge in the last remaining large substantial building, unfortunately for them the despised Temple of Claudius. Here they met their doom and were violently tortured and slaughtered and the temple burnt to the ground. Boudica and her army moved on to destroy St. Albans and London before she became over-confident and was defeated. |
|
The Romans returned to Colchester and this time built a defensive wall around the town of which about two-thirds can still be seen today. The Roman rule of Colchester was to last for over 400 more years. Little is known of the period between the end of the Roman occupation and the arrival of the Normans in around 1066, known as the Dark Ages when very little recording of history was written. When the Normans arrived they found a busy port and market town at Colchester and, concerned of the risk of an invasion from Scandinavia, almost immediately started construction of a stone castle, one of the first ever built in England. The castle, having seen very little military action in its lifetime, is still in excellent condition and is open to the public to visit. Its Keep is the largest ever built by the Normans and pre-dates the Tower of London. It is situated in the grounds of Castle Park (opened in 1892) which is host to a beautiful display of coloured flowers in the spring and summer months. Still below the castle are the remains of the foundations of the Roman Temple of Claudius, which can be seen on a guided tour. In the town are also the remains of two major religious sites built during this era, St Botolph's Priory, the first Augustinian house in England, and St John's Abbey, whose gatehouse still survives. |
| The castle played a central role in 1648 when Colchester was put under seige during the English Civil War. At the rear of the castle there is a monument which marks the spot on which two Royalist commanders, Lucas & Lisle, were executed by a Parliamentarian firing squad when the town eventually fell. |  |
|
The people of Colchester who suffered from the effects of the seige, were later to become victims of the Great Plague in which it is believed over 4,000 of them died, half the town's population at that time. The Dutch Quarter is another historic area of Colchester. It is named after a large number of Dutch refugees who fled from Flanders to Colchester in around 1575 after a failed rebellion against Catholic Spain. Many of these people were skilled weavers and set-up a community where they lived and worked. Many of their timber-framed houses and are still here in their original, unspoilt state.
Todays Colchester, is a typical blue collar small-town suburban dwelling, and in truth Blur could be borne from many similar towns in England, the often repellent, vacuous nature of this towns people described by the band isn't exclusive to Colchester alone. In testament to the towns ability to quell any creative intent (in the band's experience) it is interesting to note that the coming together of all four members of Blur came about in the more liberal and cosmopolitan setting of London. "It's cold up here (I see the universe waiting by a minibus)"
|