It was the second permanent English settlement that resulted from the beginning of British expansion overseas, following in the wake of the Spanish in the New World, and the Portuguese and Dutch elsewhere in the sixteenth and early 17th centuries.

In this context, the Town of St. George and its associated fortifications stand alone as the earliest monuments to that expansion surviving above ground. In Puerto Rico (1584), at Roanoke (1585), in the Northern Colony of Virginia (1607) and at the southern Jamestown (1607), Virginia settlements, all that exist of the pre-Bermuda (1612) attempts at colonisation are buried archaeological remains of five timbered forts.

The establishment of the first town of the incipient English empire overseas took place in Bermuda in 1612. At James Fort, in Virginia, the town was not begun apparently until 1619, seven years later.

In 1699, the Virginia capital was transferred to Williamsburg and Jamestown vanished, only to be rediscovered as archaeological traces in this century.

Other early towns in continental English America and the West Indies, all postdating St. George's, were also reduced to buried archaeological features.

While much of the early history of St. George is also buried in the Town Square and under the streets and properties themselves, the Town stands very much alone as the first English urban centre in the New World.

St. George's, Bermuda is the first English town of the British Empire following the beginning of overseas settlement in the early 1600s.

Predating the conversion of James Fort, Virginia, to Jamestown by seven years, St. George has retained much of its early street plan and many of its masonry buildings.

It has remained a living town, and has not had to be rebuilt, along the line of, say, Williamburg, Virginia.

This in its present form, the Town's built heritage is without equal as an example of early stages of English expansion throughout the world in the 17th and 18th century.

An early 19th century painting of St. George's.