Derby Museum and Art Gallery – It’s Just a Brick

I accept that this is just a brick and I really need to get out more, but this is not just a brick, it’s a Roman brick. Ignore the stuff placed on the brick, more on that later, but the Romans were the pioneers of mass production of bricks and they did it in some style. As for what the Romans did for the people of Derby, well, they built them a lovely fort in AD50 although they then decided to move their operations north and so they demolished it. However, by that point they had already built another fort at Little Chester and they didn’t demolish that one. Having noted all that, this brick is apparently from Tripontium which is about 40 miles away, but it’s a little bit of Romano-British culture. I find it intriguing to see bits of Roman brick when they appear in other buildings as the stuff seems to have lasted longer than great chunks of what they built in the 1970s. I won’t mention Anglia Square in Norwich….