This unique Colchester estate brought classes together in Victorian Britain
NEW Town, named in contrast to the “old town” centred primarily inside and near the Roman Wall, is the only part of Colchester designed to accommodate “upper, middle and lower or working classes” - a dominant feature of the structure of class segregated life in Victorian Britain.
This comprises around 470 houses built from the 1880s on what had been fields behind older dwellings in Magdalen Street and Military Road (as far as Camp Church) and facing Wimpole Road.
Subsequent housing developments in Colchester throughout the 20th century and into the 21st do not have such a deliberate social mix and built-form characteristics in the variable size and design of the dwellings in the same community.