A watching brief was carried out by Colchester Archaeological Trust during the construction of a temporary trading store for Williams & Griffin in the Colchester Borough Council car park, St Runwald Street, Colchester. <1> The archaeological monitoring took place over a period of five weeks and consisted of 11 site visits. The groundworks included the excavation of foundation-pits for the temporary building, a 130m long cable trench for a new electricity supply and the foundation for a new electrical substation. In the CBC car park, surviving floor surfaces and wall foundations from the outbuildings of the former Cups Hotel were uncovered in one of the foundation-pits and in the cable trench. Deposits of dark soil, building materials and sandy-clay appear to have been imported to raise the ground level in the northern portion of the car park prior to the construction of the outbuildings. In the plot of a former workshop to the west of West Stockwell Street, the foundations of a 19th-century building and a lead-lined pit were identified in the cable trench. The excavations monitored during this watching brief were not deep enough to impact upon any remains or deposits dating to before the late 18th or 19th centuries.