No room at the inn? No room in the Cunningham Close chimney in this case. When I wrote An Old Arbury Christmas , focusing on Christmas at the Manor Farm on Arbury Road, as celebrated by the Brett family in the early 1900s, it never occurred to me that my own memories of celebrating Christmas in Cunningham Close, South Arbury, in the 1970s are also quite distant history. It was a bit of a shock to realise that, but it is so.  So, I thought I'd write this as a follow-up to the tales of peg rugs and Christmas Eve family gatherings, of Christmas stockings filled with nuts and an apple, and games of 'Poor Puss' after Christmas Dinner. In the 1970s, an Arbury Christmas was a very different affair. The first thing that marked the start of the onset of the festive season for me as a kid was the release of the 'Annuals'. These were yearly books, supplementing comics, TV series, etc, and when they arrived at Arbury Court, the 'Stopsiz' branches in North and South Arbu...

From the Cambridge Citizens' Guide, 'Cambridge Evening News', January 1980. Bus routes in the city way back then. The old Cambridge and St Ives Branch railway line, which ran between North Arbury to the south, and Impington Park, the original King's Hedges plot and Rectory/Trinity Farm to the north, had been closed to passenger trains in the Beeching era of the late 1960s. Today, of course, it is the Guided Busway. It may surprise some that buses on the tracks were being mooted by local ecologists as far back as 1981... The Arbury area in 1900, with the Cambridge & St Ives Branch railway line - now the guided busway. 'Cambridge Evening News', 15/5/1981: Cambridge ecologists are planning a demonstration to prove that a bus which can run on railway lines is the solution to transport problems in 15 local villages. The aim is to borrow the prototype bus in early July, and run it from Cambridge's city centre to Huntingdon - and use British Rail's tracks b...

From ' Cambridge Street Names -Their Origins And Associations' by Ronald Gray and Derek Stubbings, 2010:  The only street-name in Cambridge that has connections with prehistoric times is ARBURY Road. The name is spelled Herburg, Ertburg and similar in thirteenth-century documents, and means earthwork. It used to be thought that Arbury Camp, at the north end of the road, was a fort like the one at Wandlebury or the War Ditches at LIME KILN Hill, south of the reservoir (now destroyed) but it is today regarded as an undefended site. A low circular bank and ditch about 100 metres in diameter, it was almost certainly an iron age enclosure for keeping animals safe from wolves and robbers. (See Alison Taylor: 'Prehistoric Cambridgeshire', 1977, and Sallie Purkis, 'Arbury Is Where We Live!', EARO, The Resource Centre, Back Hill, Ely, 1981.)  The book is highly recommended for anybody interested in Cambridge history. Times change, and modern archaeological digs have ...

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...

The Arbury Community Centre on the Arbury Town Park in Campkin Road, was campaigned for by the Arbury Community Association and other community members, and took years to become reality. This year, 2024, marks fifty years of the Centre. The beginnings were fraught with financial difficulties, and even in May 1974, shortly before the official opening, nothing was secure. Arbury Ward councillor Peter Cowell, and others, stated that the centre needed more financial input from the Council.  Said Mr Cowell:  'It looks like being a white elephant before we even get it off the ground.' However, the centre survived and does to this day. But 1974 also brought more problems - this time with the centre's original signage: From the Cambridge Evening News , May 14, 1974: Residents see red over community centre sign Residents living opposite the new Arbury Community Centre, in Campkin Road, are seeing red - in more senses than one. The centre's temporary corrugated iron end-wall is f...