For 400 years Colchester's cloth industry placed it among the top fifteen towns in the kingdom. It saw Protestants burnt at the stake, withstood a Civil War siege, was ravaged by Plague and stood in the front line against invasion, first by Napoleon, then by Hitler. An important engineering town since Victorian times, it is today a regional shopping centre, a major garrison town and a popular tourist attraction. This authoritative, readable and well illustrated work, from a professional historian, will doubtless become the standard work on this ancient town for at least the next half century.
