The 1960s context for the original museum was specific and now slightly poignant. Post-war Leicester needed both an adult learning college - the successor to the long-running Vaughan Working Men's College - and a place to house the city's growing collection of Roman and medieval archaeological finds, which Kathleen Kenyon's pre-war excavation of the Jewry Wall site had massively expanded. The compromise was a single building that did both, with Vaughan College on the upper floor and the museum on the ground floor, looking out at the wall and bath foundations through full-height glazing. Trevor Dannatt, an English modernist with a careful eye for materiality, designed it. The result is Grade II listed today as a piece of post-war architecture. It also, by the early 2000s, was visibly tired. Vaughan College vacated in 2013. The University of Leicester, which had owned the building, put it on the market. Leicester City Council bought it in 2016 and began planning what would become almost a decade of reinvention.

What the museum holds is the kind of provincial Roman collection that ought to be much better known. The Cyparissus Pavement is a 4th-century mosaic floor depicting the mythological figure Cyparissus mourning the deer he accidentally killed - the kind of mosaic you would expect to see in a museum in Italy, not in a city more famous for hosiery and football. The Blackfriars Pavement is another substantial Roman floor, lifted in pieces from a city-centre excavation and reassembled. The Norfolk Street Wall Paintings preserve fragments of Romano-British domestic decoration, ochres and reds and Pompeii-style geometric patterns surviving in a climate that destroyed almost all the equivalent material elsewhere in northern Europe. The Thurmaston Milestone marks a road that has long disappeared. And throughout the collection is the slow accumulation of finds from modern Leicester's redevelopments - every time a developer breaks ground in the city centre, the archaeologists arrive first, and the museum has been the steady beneficiary.

The story of how the museum survived its low point is worth telling because it shows what civic institutions actually depend on. In 2004, when the city council moved to reduce opening hours to save money, a group of regulars and former patrons constituted themselves as the Friends of Jewry Wall Museum and began making noise. The cuts went through anyway. But the Friends kept pushing - through the press, through the council chamber, through the slow drip of letters and questions and motions. The hours were eventually restored after a motion led by former Labour council leader Ross Willmott. None of this is dramatic; all of it mattered. By the time the University put the building up for sale in 2013, the constituency that wanted to keep the museum had become organised enough to push the council into buying it. None of the cinematic version of museum-saving applies here. The actual version involved committee meetings.

The renovated museum is built around full visual access to the Roman ruins outside. The previous building had treated the bath foundations and the Jewry Wall almost as an exterior accident - something you looked at through a window but did not interact with. The new design changes that. Multimedia exhibits sit alongside the original artefacts; immersive sound and projection environments recreate the bathhouse in operation; the upper floor, freed from its old life as a college, now extends the display space dramatically. The pandemic and the discovery of unexpected building problems pushed the reopening back repeatedly, but the result has been received as worth the wait. The entry fee, introduced for the first time, is structured to help the council recoup the cost of the work. The café is free to enter. If the Friends had not fought through the lean years, none of this would exist. If Trevor Dannatt's original building had been demolished rather than rethought, the city would have lost a particular kind of mid-century optimism. Both survived. Both, finally, are working.