Verulamium Park is a Scheduled Ancient Monument covering the Roman City of Verulamium.
Excavated in the 1930’s and 1950’s, with many of the artefacts on display in Verulamium Museum, the archaeological remains of the city are mostly protected beneath the ground. As such a significant site, we now study it through non-intrusive methods such as Geophysics and LiDAR surveys, and only excavate when absolutely necessary. But we all want to see more…
As part of our Arts Council funding we are working on a Digitising Verulamium Park Project to engage park visitors with the historic significance of where they are whilst directly relating this to our collections at Verulamium Museum, our open Hypocaust building, and the visible remains of the Roman city of Verulamium.
Meet Our Partner - Sugar Creative
After extensive research into augmented reality (AR) experiences across the UK, we are pleased to announce that Sugar Creative will be working with us to bring Roman Verulamium to life.
Having previously brought the medieval history of Winchester to life using an immersive, geolocated app, 878 AD: Winchester Revealed, we are delighted that the team will be now using their skills to resurrect Roman Verulamium, raising it out of the ground and making it ready to be explored.
Join our Focus Group
We are narrowing down our ideas and working with Sugar Creative to move this project forward but can’t do this without help from you – would you want to join one of our focus groups helping us with our concepts and testing?
Please email your interest to Museum@stalbans.gov.uk with the subject line ‘Focus Groups’ and we’ll add you to the group and look forward to involving you in this exciting project.
3rd Century AD Roman town house outline
In October 2024 we worked with our community partner ‘Passport to Leisure’ to paint an outline of one of our known 3rd Century AD Roman town houses close to Inn on the Park to showcase how much is unknown to our regular visitors.
Did you know that remains of the Roman City of Verulamium exists beneath the park from the visible town walls and London Gate, all the way past the central Municipal buildings of the Forum and Basilica (in the grounds of St Michael’s Church), and through into the Gorhambury estate?
We had a great day outlining this building, producing content for our project, and showing visitors the scale of the city and the buildings that stood here! Watch out for more building outlines next year...
Hypocaust
We’ve also been testing some ideas in our free Hypocaust exhibit, asking our visitors how we can enhance our interpretation there with audio/visual tools. At the end of November 2024 we will be installing some new interactive tools at the Hypocaust building and look forward to seeing how our visitors react to this and will ask for feedback.
Research
Identifying what stories we want to tell and how to deliver them have been central to our research phase. Our team have also been busy visiting similar exhibits and talking with museum and digital content professionals across the country and beyond, including colleagues at the British Museum, The National Portrait Gallery, Glastonbury Abbey, the RAF Museum, and Trimontium Museum.
