King Henry In Arbury?

'John of Ely' asks:

'What's the link between Arbury Road and King Henry VIII? I heard a modern folk song recently referring to it and the old Snowcat pub?'

As far as we know, King Henry VIII never had any links to the Cambridge Arbury Road, John. The song writer/s may have got mixed up with Arbury in Nuneaton - which did have history with a couple of kings of that name:

Arbury Hall, like so many other great country houses, was founded in Henry II’s reign as a monastery but suffered dissolution and confiscation at the hands of Henry VIII in 1536.

- https://arburyestate.co.uk/history/

The 'King's Hedges' thing in Arbury comes from the inappropriately named 'King's Hedges' electoral ward/estate. King's Hedges was historically north of what is now the guided busway (see map) and the most likely source of the name is a hunting warren, a warren of hedges, planted to trap and kill animals for hunting 'sport'. The Royal Manor of Chesterton, which included the whole of the Arbury and Chesterton area, belonged to the king - William the Conqueror having taken a fancy to it - and the hedges of the warren were an obvious landmark, hence 'The King's Hedges'.

Land north of Arbury Road was known as the Arbury or Harborough Meadows before the establishment of Manor Farm in the years following the 1840 Chesterton Enclosures. Harborough was an interchangeable variation on the Arbury name, both versions originating from the prehistoric earthwork, Arbury Camp.

King's Hedges was a 58 acre farm north of what is now the Guided Busway, named by the Brackyn family of Chesterton Hall. It was not a district.

The hedges on Arbury Road were simply field boundaries, and nothing to do with King's Hedges at all. An 1829 newspaper report contains details of a sale at a property called Arbury Hedges at the Histon/Cambridge Road end of the historic Arbury Road, which was lopped off, realigned, and renamed 'King's Hedges Road' in the late 1970s.

Council planners' whims, the naming of King's Hedges School in the 1960s, and the huge expansion and redirection of the dead-end King's Hedges Road (Northern Peripheral Road in its planning stages) in the late 1970s moved the KH name into the North Arbury area by the old earthwork artificially. There was no 'King's Hedges' history in that area to base it on.

The Pulley, Buchan Street, King's Hedges Learner Pool and recreation ground are in fields that were known as 'Arbury' and 'Arbury Field' in the Manor Farm days and the Arbury/Harborough Meadows, North Arbury/Harborough Furlong, West Arbury/Harborough Corner and Arbury/Harborough Furlong, before that.

This is why we refer to the area as North Arbury. Councils creating new electoral wards out of a part of the original Arbury Ward and naming things 'King's Hedges' willy-nilly does not a truly historic area make.

Arbury it was, complete with prehistoric links. And Arbury it remains.

Comments

TitchMarch 11, 2022 at 11:22 AM
The bloke that wrote that song also said that the Snow Cat was in North Arbury (it was South Arbury) and that they started building King's Hedges Estate in 1959 - which was wrong. It was North Arbury. Nice song but it wasn't very factual.
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