At a very early date in his life Roach Smith felt the passion of collecting Roman and British remains, and he was encouraged by Alfred John Kempe, whom he considered to be his "antiquarian godfather".

[3] His fellow antiquaries urged that the collection should be secured by England, but his offer of it to the British Museum in March 1855 was declined as they could not agree on a price.

He wrote the book for the most part as a result of his personal investigations while he lived in Lothbury and in Liverpool Street, in the City of London.

When, through the medium of his friend, the Abbé Cochet, he intervened successfully with Napoleon III for the preservation of the Roman walls of Dax, a medal was struck in France in 1858 in honour of Roach Smith to commemorate the event.

At a meeting in 1890 of the Society of Antiquaries, it had been proposed to strike a medal in his honour, and to present him with the balance of any fund that might be collected.

[6] He made a variety of contributions to the Numismatic Chronicle, and in 1883 he received the first medal of the society, in recognition of his services in promoting the knowledge of Romano-British coins.

After his retirement to Strood, he actively assisted in the work of the Kent Archaeological Society, and contributed many papers to the Archaeologia Cantiana.

He was also an honorary member of the Archaeological Societies of Madrid, Wiesbaden, Mayence, Treyes, Chester, Cheshire and Lancashire, Suffolk, and Surrey.

Their source was two Londoners, William Smith and Charles Eaton, illiterate mudlarks, who purportedly obtained them from the large-scale excavations then taking place at Shadwell Dock.

In 1864, he was involved in an action at law with the dean and chapter of Rochester over some reclaimed land adjoining his property, and Roach Smith won the case.

He especially applied himself to pomology as well as growing vines in open ground, making considerable quantities of wine from the grapes which he reared.

His pamphlet On the Scarcity of Home-grown Fruits in Great Britain, which first appeared in the Proceedings of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire in 1863, passed into a second edition, and a thousand copies were distributed in France and Germany.

He advocated the planting of the waste ground on the sides of railways with dwarf apple trees and with other kinds of fruit, and this suggestion was adopted to a considerable extent abroad and to a limited degree in England.