Don't know much about history - take a walk with the country's most unique tour guide

Due to their success he's back again raising more money for Sir Bob's plan to have a statue of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star built and situated in the town centre.

Starting last Sunday, The Gazette's Neil D'Arcy-Jones decided to join him on his first tour of the season.

IT'S a warm April morning and there's a small horde of enthusiastic people waiting outside the Colchester Arts Centre for what has to be the most unique guided tour of any town in Britain.

That's because our tour guide is a knight of the realm, a former Member of Parliament and recently made High Steward of Colchester. There cannot be many places in this country, if any, that can claim a tour guide like that.

As Sir Bob Russell informs us, when he arrives in a very smart grey suit with the statutory Town Charter Tie on, this is no 'Blue Badge Guided Tour'.

And to be fair it isn't. If you want precise and pin point accurate historical detail a Blue Badged Guide is probably a better choice.

If you're after an enigmatic, light-hearted and occasionally political insight into Britain's Oldest Recorded Town, then Sir Bob is your man.

For his first walk of 2016 we are on Tour 'A'. Apparently when Sir Bob decided to embark on this new enterprise, after being ousted from his seat last May, he took a walk around Colchester and found so much stuff he wanted to get in, he had to split the tours in two.

And as he continues we discover that for his very first walk, it rained. We are far more fortunate this morning.

Gathering at the Colchester Arts Centre, it's a two hour jaunt around some familiar, and not so familiar sights, ending up at a surprise location, which isn't really much of a surprise, because if you're going to finish a tour of Colchester, you're going to want to complete it at what should be regarded as our historical piece de resistance, the magnificent Norman Keep, the largest in mainland Europe. Although to be fair to Sir Bob technically we finish at the rather wonderful town memorial just outside the Castle Park Gates.

Before all of that though Sir Bob winds us through the nooks and crannies of the town, cracking a few jokes, getting a little bit political and generally being jolly entertaining.

We start, as he puts it, with an area that covers '2,000 years of history' rather bizarrely just above a very busy Balkerne Hill. Manly battling with the passing noisy traffic he shows us the Roman Wall, the Tower of St Mary's Church (now the arts centre) and across the road, and this is the bizarre bit, St Mary's multi-storey car park.

Ok, so I get the Roman Wall, and even St Mary's. This is the place where Humpty Dumpty may have fallen off the wall, except Sir Bob says it didn't, except I prefer to tell my children it did. Well I'm a writer and us writers never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

But a multi-storey car park? Well he mentions it because this year is the 50th anniversary of the very first multi-storey car park built in Colchester at North Hill and Sir Bob knows that because he wrote about it in the newspaper when he was a reporter. I told you it was a different kind of history ramble.

As it happens the newspaper gets quite a few mentions in today's tour, which I'm guessing is not an actual part of the walk but just for my benefit. In fact there are more than a few occasions when I think Sir Bob is going off script but funnily enough it's this laissez-faire approach which makes the guided tour so charming.

When we get to the Jumbo Water Tower, and having already clocked the Chairman of the Balkerne Trust in his crowd, Sir Bob reverently hands over to Brian Light so he can tell us all about this incredible building and the future that is hoped for it.

Then there's the moments when Sir Bob just cannot resist having a dig at the council, mainly previous ones, who decided, and I agree with him here, to destroy this picturesque historical place in the name of town planning.

Perhaps the most heinous of these acts was the wilful destruction of the Cups Hotel on the High Street in the Sixties, which was left to decay before being torn down to make way for a monstrosity that they laughingly called the Greytown Building (you couldn't make it up). Sir Bob gives credit, where credit is due here, for the role the newspaper played in trying to document this outrage but unfortunately it was just one in a catalogue of blunders previous planners have made including the buildings of Balkerne Hill and Southway, not to mention the town's two major shopping areas, which ripped the heart of the historic town centre.

You can see it still rankles with the former MP.

But there are some fond moments too and no where more so than outside the old St George's Gymnasium, which became the former Bunting Rooms, on Culver Street West, where one of the country's oldest Scouting groups was formed. It's as personal for Sir Bob as it it for me with my two boys going to the same group as his two grandsons.

Later we tread more familiar ground along the heart of historic Colchester, Trinity Street with its Saxon church and Tymperleys, the former home of William Gilberd. It's staple fair any tourist would lap up but what a good old Colcestrian like me has known from childhood.

However Colchester is so rich with history there are still snippets of cultural nuggets that even someone like me doesn't know about such as the beneficial Mr Richard Catchpool, whose generous bequest in his Will enabled the Corporation to buy the site of the original area of Castle Park.

I was always led to believe it was Viscount Cowdray, following his escapades in Mexico, which led to this glorious expanse of greenery but apparently Cowdray just purchased the Castle, Hollytrees House and its lawn for the town.

And while that is of course something that should be applauded it appears such accolades have rather overlooked Mr Catchpool. As ever Sir Bob is here to put the record straight.

Sir Bob has a whole host of walks arranged for the rest of year, taking place, normally every other week, which can be booked through the Colchester Arts Centre, which Sir Bob asked to say 'have been extremely supportive, and without whom my Heritage Tours would not be the success they have become.'

He has now raised £5,800 towards his wish to have statues of Jane and Ann Taylor erected somewhere in the town and if I was you I would go on one of his tours to help him realise that dream.

And you'll have an interesting and jolly nice time while doing it.

HAVING started his career working on the Essex County Standard, Sir Bob became the youngest newspaper editor in Britain when he took over the helm of the Maldon and Burnham Standard shortly before his 22nd birthday in 1968.

Later he worked as a sub-editor for four years in London, mostly on the former Evening News before moving to the Evening Standard, and spent time as a publicity information officer and press officer before his election to parliament in 1997.

Politically he was elected as a Labour councillor for New Town in 1971.

A decade later, he defected to the newly formed Social Democratic Party, which merged with the Liberal Party to create the Liberal Democrats in 1988.

During the Eighties, he served as Colchester’s mayor and briefly as council leader of a minority Social Democratic Party-Liberal alliance administration.