The Old Work, Wroxeter · Jeff Buck, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Old Work, Wroxeter

Thermae Viroconii

BathhouseBritannia · Wroxeter, EnglandBuilt 150 CE

Not standing in 117 CE

About

Builders raised this soaring wall of brick-banded stone around 150 CE as part of Viroconium's vast civic baths, and at seven meters tall it remains the largest freestanding fragment of Roman masonry anywhere in Britain. Work on the baths complex only began after Hadrian took the throne, and this section was not finished for another three decades, so it did not exist when Trajan died on 11 August 117. Rows of square sockets still visible in the stonework mark exactly where Roman masons anchored their scaffolding as they built it.

What happened here

The furnaces are lit before dawn and the water is hot by the eighth hour, which is when the town arrives. The circuit is a habit: undress and hand your clothes to an attendant who may or may not be watching them, exercise in the courtyard, sweat in the hot room, scrape the oil and dirt off with a curved bronze strigil, then the warm pool and the cold plunge. Entry costs a coin small enough that almost nobody is priced out, and on a benefactor's birthday it is free. There is food, drink, ball games, gambling, hair-plucking, business and shouting; a writer complaining about the noise from the flat above is complaining about all of it. Men and women bathe at different hours, or in separate wings.