An archaeological watching brief was undertaken during refurbishment of the Colchester Visitor Centre (CBC planning application F/COL/04/1488). The watching brief was focused on the ground floor where nine trenches of various depths and dimensions were excavated by the building contractor. Nine trenches were excavated by the contractor's employees and recorded by a CAT archaeologist. The size and depth of the trenches varied, with an average depth of 0.67m (from 0.28m to 1.02m). Six trenches were located within no 3 Queen Street (Trench or T1, T2, T4, T5, T6, T7), one trench was excavated within no 2 Queen Street (T3), one trench (T8) was excavated behind the eastern outer wall of no 2, and one trench (T9) was dug in the property’s inner courtyard (not recorded in detail because of its purely late Victorian-modern contents). The groundworks were mainly in number 3, but there were also two trenches in number 2 and one in the property’s inner courtyard at the rear. In places, the works provided very limited exposures of what appears to be the remains of a substantial Roman house in the form of a robber trench for a foundation and Roman demolition debris. There were no surviving medieval deposits other than the 12th – 13th century robber trench. The fabric of the standing building shows number 1 to be a late 18th-century construction (originally one unit incorporating the present 67-67a High Street). It is a red brick two-storey house with attic. Nothing appears to survive above ground of its predecessor. Number 2 is also mainly a rebuilt red brick edifice of the late 18th century although it seems to be of late medieval origin and was once part of number 3. The southern part of the Visitor Centre (no 3) was erected in the 15th or possibly early 16th century. Originally it was a three-storied, jettied, half-timbered building with a narrow carriage archway at its southern end. A large red-brick chimney was inserted into numbers 2 and 3 in the early 17th century. <1>