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. AUTHOR: Andrew Phillips is a Fellow of the Department of History at the University of Essex. For many years responsible for training Blue Badge tourist guides for the town, in 1988 he founded the Colchester Recalled Oral History Group and, soon afterwards, became chairman of the Friends of Colchester Museum. He was honorary librarian and a former president of the Essex Society for Archaeology and History. 145 b/w illustrations