The club was formed in the early 70's and was part of the now de-funct British Bottle Collectors Club.

The Colchester Club has always had a 'hardcore' of regular diggers that simply love to dig, regardless of what they find.

Colchester Town is the oldest recorded town in England and has certainly turned up some superb finds both in the Roman relics and in the old bottles categories. Some of the best Roman and Saxon finds can be viewed by visiting the Colchester Castle Museum. Some of the best digging finds were also found in the 80's whe the lower Castle river was dredged, leaving lots of bottles laying on the river bed. It was here that Dave Van Loon (when he lived down here in Essex) pulled out a superb bellarmine jug. Other finds included early stone dated tankards, various freeblowns and some good early stoneware. Unlike other clubs our main tips were discovered and dug extensively in the late 80s, early 90's with three large Victorian/Edwardian tips that allowed us regular digging for over 25 years.

Colchester has some superb minerals to offer that include coloured lip codds, coloured marbles, a range of Sykes McVay dimple patents, coloured dumpy codds, early hybrids and one superb pictorial ovate shaped Edward's patent. We also have coloured pictorial seltzers and probably the eariest dated blue lipped ginger beers from the company of Stopes and Sons. Other notable local rarities that have been found close by to Colchester include the Britannia, Kelvedon red lipped acme patents(if you have heard of the famous Wilkins & co jam producers they were originally the Brittania fruit preserve co.) Cracknells of Brightlingsea and Kettles of Harwich green codds plus the pictorial hybrids from Chelmsford. Finally we must not forget the superb bacon's of Burnham on Crouch blue topped ginger beer of which I know of two only.

For good reason, most of these bottles, when they are discovered soon disappear into local collections. The club has been run since 1982 by Martin and Andy Bloomfield. All are welcome to attend, display or have a sales table. We meet on the last Friday of every month (see 'meeting dates' page for more details) and have regulars who attend from Essex, Kent, Ipswich and Cambridge.

 

This website has only recently been added to our history, created by Lee Bloomfield. Technology has been and still is a great aid to the sales of bottles, getting out information and much more.