A watching brief on the site of Sargeant’s Engineering Works recorded the remains of Roman town houses - principally robbed wall lines, tessellated pavements and mortar floors. This confirmed the result of a 1993 evaluation on the same site, which suggested that Roman deposits probably existed below the level of the 1993 test trenches. The watching brief recorded the remains of several different Roman structures. The most extensive was a building which is no doubt to be interpreted as a normal Roman town-house, occupying the north-west corner of Insula 5 of the Roman town. There were Roman walls on both the west and east sides of the site. It is not possible to say whether these are part of one house, or several. On balance, and because this is the corner plot in the insula, it is quite likely that all the walls recorded are part of one building. The house was built in the normal fashion with stone 3 plinths, and its rooms were floored with tessellated paving, and possibly mosaic in one case. The tessellated floor in the northwest corner of the site has been seen before, in 1920 when the site was occupied by Messrs Truslove. There is some reason to suppose that the room at the north end of the east side of the site was not a normal room. It had a low floor, and may therefore have been a hypocausted room, or maybe a cellar. It is difficult to comment on the layout of the house, but the wall on the north edge of the site is probably the outside wall of the house. The trench down the east side cut through several wall lines quite close together, at least one of which is presumably a corridor or similar narrow room. Houses of this type, with masonry walls and tessellated floors, are normally of second century date in Colchester, and there seems no reason to think otherwise in this case. However, there is very good reason to suspect that this was not the first building on the site, because there were at least one if not two earlier floors exposed in some of the trenches. These will conventionally be first-century or early second-century structures of the types commonly seen elsewhere in Colonia Claudia Victricensis. 3 septaria mudstone in yellow or brown mortar, in this case.<1>