Chester with its Victorian faux-tudor shops, city walls and general air of affluent Liverpudlians gone rural, and footballers' wives in Range Rovers, has long been known as the site of an important Roman military and civilian settlement. It wasn’t until part of the pit wall was unearthed in 1929 just in time to avert a road scheme, that the site of the amphitheatre was discovered. Half of it was excavated in the 1950s and work to uncover and present it started in 2000. It was a full stone structure with two courses of arches and a seating capacity of 8-12,000.

The combination of a high-value riverside site and most of the southern half lying under a listed (but as of 2019 semi-derelict) Georgian former convent, together with a possibly short sighted and unpopular decision by Cheshire County Council to permit the construction of a new court building over the south-westernmost corner is symptomatic of a lack of energetic commitment or reverence toward the Amphitheatre. It’s a shame. The half that is exposed is well presented. It is however truncated by a well-intentioned but rather sad trompe l'oeil mural. There’s a neat bronze, scale model on display by the bridge that passes overhead along the line of the mural, but the overall impression continues to be of a wasted opportunity to excavate and present what could be the largest, most sophisticated and probably best preserved Roman amphitheatre in Britain.