We recently uploaded our second Arbury Cambridge YouTube video, another whirlwind tour of Arbury from the Iron Age right up to the North Cambridge Academy! We included a couple of quotes from the oral history contributions to the original Arbury Archive and much more, and we're very happy with it. We've also included a tribute to our sadly missed Arbury Archivist Debbie Brett to close on. Thanks so much for all the support we've received, many terrific comments and lovely e-mails. We are now averaging around 4,000 page views per month, so our dream of having a positive Arbury space online, and re-establishing exactly where Arbury is, are attracting interest. We're hoping Andy, Debbie's husband, the creator of the original Arbury Archive back in 1983 (inspired by the writings of teacher and historian Sallie Purkis in History Today magazine, the Arbury 1980 project and the 1981 book, Arbury Is Where We Live! ) will be back with us soon.
The excellent 'Arbury 1980' primary schools project led to one pupil from King's Hedges School writing: We have reasons to be proud to live in Arbury with such a rich history. People have lived here for thousands of years. The project swept pupils back to the iron age Arbury Camp, through the Roman invasion, and on through the history of the Arbury farms, Hall and Manor, the building of the estate, and life in 1980 for the pupils of the (then) present day. In 1981, the book Arbury Is Where We Live! was published and in 1983 one of the great powers behind the project, Sallie Purkis of Homerton College, schools officer of the Oral History Society and the general editor of the Longman books series, Into The Past , detailed the project in History Today magazine. It was a real Red Letter Day for the original Arbury Estate. Sallie believed in Arbury as a place on the map, and was a great encouragement to me when I began to delve into my family's pre-estate Arbury history...