New Iron Age roundhouse to be built at Peterborough’s Flag Fen

The city’s archaeology park has been given approval for a replica timber Iron Age Round House building as a replacement for a previous similar building on the same footprint.

The new Round House will have an educational resource space inside, which will allow the park to offer a wide range of educational activities within the park for all visitors.

The plans state: “It is our intention to form a new educational resource space, to allow the park to undertaken its varying range of educational activities within the park for all visitors. It shall be modest in scale, be single storey with timber clad walls and thatched roof. It shall have a single open doorway set in an easterly direction.

“The design shall be a replica in scale, material form and be constructed in the manner of an original iron age round house, using best available sympathetic materials of character and local skilled labour. Proposals will be visually and proportionally sympathetic to the adjacent park buildings.

“Internally, the Arena building will provide open plan flexible space, used for educational purposes.”

Flag Fen was also boosted this week (March 31) with the announcement that the city council has received £342,600 of funding from the government’s cultural recovery fund to support and maintain venues such as Flag Fen.

A spokesperson for the city council said: “We are delighted to have received this significant Culture Recovery Funding. This money will be vital to help with maintenance and running costs of Flag Fen and Peterborough Museum, which are important cultural assets for our city.

“We are fully committed to supporting the city’s cultural offering and despite financial challenges have much to look forward to. Peterborough has already been named as a priority place for support by Arts Council England and we are developing a Cultural Strategy to significantly boost the city’s cultural offering over the next decade.”