A Global History in One City

Modern, thriving and quirky, the bustling 21st-century Chester we see today has been built around history. The city's ancient cathedral, medieval walls, Roman amphitheatre and gardens, and the 13th-century Rows, all keep us in touch with Chester’s compelling and important past.

In the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Chester, the study of the past ranges over nearly twenty thousand years; from the hunter-gatherers living in Europe at the end of the last Ice Age through to the fall of Rome and Cold War America. Members of the Department are experts on a wide range of topics and periods, covering early and later prehistory, the Romans, Saxons and Vikings, the Crusades, the Consumer Revolution, the English Civil War, the Holocaust, Genocide, and minorities and migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is a truly global mix of specialisms.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, the Department’s historians and archaeologists set themselves the challenge of rooting their own research in the city of Chester itself, to demonstrate how the local history of Chester is undeniably part of a rich and dynamic global history.