Colchester’s Heritage

This sculpture survey completed in 2024, was undertaken by Robert Mercer for the Planning Department records rather than specifically the Civic Society. It includes the latest addition to the High Street, The sculpture of The Taylor sisters and the commemoration of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

There is also a section dedicated to the University of Essex Sculpture collection.

The impressive war memorial at the east end of Colchester High Street is a major landmark, but Colchester possess more than fifty other memorials dating from the Great War of 1914 – 1918.
In October 2017 Dr Paul Rusiecki was requested by the Colchester Civic Society to produce a survey of all the borough’s war memorials connected with the Great War. The aim was to establish whether any of them required repairs and/or refurbishment during 2018, the centenary of the Armistice, and the year in which funding for such matters might reasonably be expected to end. We are pleased to report that none were found to be in need of repair.

This survey started from an innocent question at one of the Civic Society’s monthly coffee mornings about how many of the cast iron lamp posts are still in the town. Colchester does have a large number of identifiable posts produced by the town’s own foundries in the mid 19th c onwards. Immediately it was proposed that we should undertake a street by street survey to discover just how many survived. Several members offered to assist including myself; and Jo Edwards, our Chair, asked for the survey to extend to the street furniture especially her favourite, the bollards.

In the Autumn of 2019 ,Colchester Borough Council voted to adopt the new national criteria for local listing . This meant a much broader range of artefacts might be now listed . Colchester has an unusually large heritage of ceramic street names as well as a modest number of earlier cast iron street names which these largely replaced.
The following survey, conducted by Bob Mercer, includes a photographic record of each individual sign and position along with the distribution map, which is the necessary detail for that listing .

The Post Box shown above is the one which created the urgent need for a Survey of the post boxes in the Borough of Colchester.  It was removed from Mersea Road, near the Grapes Public House. The Civic Society’s concern was that this pillar box was one of only two surviving “Anonymous” boxes which dated from 1879 and were the oldest in the Borough.

At the request of the Conservation Office at Colchester Planning Department, Bob Mercer offered to create a record that would ensure this might never happen again.