GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Roman Britain was coming of age - and not just for the chosen few in their palaces. Across southern Britain towns like Bath were springing up. They brought the benefits of Roman rule to the ordinary people of Britain - and what benefits they were!

(In the Roman Baths at Bath)

I don't think you'll see anything else like this in Britain: a monumental Roman bath still full of water, and it's just part of a whole suite of baths and a complex of shrines and even a classical temple, making up an enormous Roman leisure entertainment and religious complex.

(At Covent Garden in London with Gustav Milne)

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Just imagine the impact of these new cities on the Iron Age people in Britain, with their roundhouses built of wattle and daub. Their lives must have been transformed by contact with Rome.

Gustav, I'd like to try and get an idea of what the architecture was like in Roman London and all the other towns, and the kind of effect that must have had on the people who were living here?

GUSTAV MILNE
Right, well the the whole concept of a town like Londonium was very alien to the Iron Age Britons, living as they were in mud walled thatched round houses, to be faced with buildings of stone, buildings of brick, colonnades, huge open public spaces.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Presumably buildings a bit like that, I mean it's obviously a church but it looks like a Roman temple?

GUSTAV MILNE
Well that's right.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
The heart of any big Roman town was the market and administration area - known as the forum and basilica. The best modern parallel is with somewhere like Covent Garden in London. What you'd have seen two thousand years ago is something like this.

GUSTAV MILNE
We can expect the the sound of music, we can expect the occasional hunting dog going wild. We can expect the smell of the fish sauce. The products from the villa estates have been brought in to the towns to be sold, tourists passing through, soldiers off duty, a whole mix of people speaking different languages, making transactions, bartering, a bazaar: 'No that's too much', 'Aah, my brother, he sell cheaper'. You can expect all this kind of thing. This is what markets are all about.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Now that's the commercial side of things but what about governing and organising a province or a city like London. How was that done?

GUSTAV MILNE
The administration would have been conducted in the great basilica, this huge hall which dominated the forum market place.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
So it would have been right next to all this commercial activity?

GUSTAV MILNE
It would have been right on the northern side, overlooking the courtyard. There was a huge building a hundred meters long. That's longer than this arcade here.

(At Chedworth Roman Villa)

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Now because the Romans placed such an emphasis on towns it's very easy to get the impression that most of them lived in towns like us. But in fact the vast majority of the population lived in the countryside, and most of those people were really very poor. They were peasants living in simple farm steads. A small number of families, though, had done really well out of the Roman occupation and they lived in extravagant country houses - a bit like this one at Chedworth.

Chedworth Roman villa is in a fabulous location in the Cotswolds. Discovered in the 19th Century by a gamekeeper searching for a lost ferret, the site's dominated now by a Victorian hunting lodge. Excavations here have revealed a magnificent Roman country residence. There is still a lot of mystery about the villas. We don't know for certain the names of any villa owners - but we can assume that a villa like Chedworth would have belonged to a British family who had made good under the Romans, probably making much of their money from farming. What a villa like this shows is that the Romans weren't just brilliant at building cities - they really understood the countryside and how to build there too.

STEWART AINSWORTH
Landscape Archaeologist
You've got shelter from this ridge, from the prevailing westerly winds. You've got the junction geologically between limestone and Fuller's Earth, which means that water will actually come out in a spring line along the ridge. You'll have a ready made supply of running water, high up the hill where it's also dry. So you can put a house there, it won't be damp it won't be in the valley bottom. And so you've got all the factors round about you which help choose your location for you.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
And we know this is a Roman villa but what actually is a Roman villa?

STEWART AINSWORTH That's a good question. I think a villa can be anything, from a small country retreat for for the urban worthies out from Cirencester, right up to a huge thriving farm and and fairly prestige lodging. It can be a whole range of things and I think it's wrong to think of a villa as just being one thing.

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