Arbury 1959: The Manor School For Boys And The Last Remaining Vestiges of Manor Farm...

A fascinating mix of old and new in this view of the Manor School for Boys, Arbury Road, in 1959. Some Manor Farm buildings are still in existence, and will be until 1960. The Manor was built using the highly modern 'intergrid' system, which was later reviled by some. Many years later, Principal Ben Slade described it as looking like a 'grim 1960s car park'.

Well, to be honest, nobody could call the original Chesterton Community College building of 1935 an architectural show piece (the view down Bateson Road hardly reveals an aesthetically pleasing structure), and as one Arbury Archivist said at the time of Mr Slade's comment: 'With headmasters like that, who needs enemies?'

Mr Slade was, however, campaigning for improvements to the school. During his reign it became an 'academy' of the performing arts. Some locals expected to find pupils dancing on the tops of cars in legwarmers in Arbury Road, like the kids from Fame, but this never came to pass.

The Girls' school was completed in 1960 (for the first year, all pupils shared the boys' school buildings). The school went co-ed in 1970.

 

The Manor Farm occupied much of the land north of Arbury Road, incorporating land containing the old Arbury/Harborough Meadows. The Manor School occupied part of the old 'Park' pasture land, and part of the site is now occupied by North Cambridge Academy. Most of King's Hedges Road was not built until the late 1970s, and Arbury Road, theorised to be on the course of a prehistoric track connecting Arbury Camp to the river in what is now Chesterton, connected Milton Road with the Histon/Cambridge Road. Here, King's Hedges occupies its original fifty eight acres, north of the railway line - now the Guided Busway. The prehistoric Arbury Camp earthwork can be seen on the map (the western half had been obliterated by this time) by the original junction of the Arbury and Histon/Cambridge roads.