Arbury Summer 2026 Update: A Rubikian Puzzle at the Kingsway Flats, Tesco's Arrival in Campkin Road, An Enquiry from The Meadows, and the Etymologically Incorrect Albrach...
And so to the Kingsway Flats in their 'Rubikian phase'. Should the Kingsway Flats have been renamed 'Rubik's Cube Buildings' in 1982? With the confusing boards to direct visitors around the complex, it certainly seemed like an idea...
Cambridge Evening News, 26 February, 1982:
Families living in the Kingsway Flats on the Arbury estate in Cambridge are thinking of asking the city council to name the block 'Rubik Cube Buildings'.
They claim visitors need a super-scientific brain to make sense of the direction boards just put up at the six entrances.
The boards, which show a pattern of coloured squares with numbers on them, are the same at each entrance, although the irregularly shaped building looks quite different when approached from different sides.
Each board also states: 'You Are Here' - which, residents point out, should be obvious to the visitor.
For three years Coun Liz Gard, one of the Labour councillors for the area, pressed the housing department to put up direction boards at the entrances. The residents often complained to her that their friends could not find their flats in the maze of passages.
Coun Gard was happy when the department told her the boards were going up. Then the tenants started to complain again - they were foxed by the boards and claimed a computer was needed to work out the directions.
Coun Gard said: 'After all this time, now that the boards have gone up they are all wrong.
'Some of them are the wrong way round and this is making everything much more confusing. They show that the caretaker's flat is on the wrong floor.
'I am asking the council to take down the boards and put up some correct ones. People visiting the place for the first time are going to find themselves lost if they take notice of the boards.'
Mrs Margaret Davenport, who is an official of the tenants' association and lives in flat 65, is as confused as anybody. She said: 'We call them our Rubik Cubes. Everything on the boards is a mirror image and appears to be the wrong way round. We just cannot work them out.'
The council's housing manager, Mr Ken Foster, said: 'Oh yes - I have heard about this. We shall have to take down the boards and see what we can do again.'
Does anybody remember how this puzzle was finally resolved? If so, please let us know!
Mrs Williams has asked: Have you any news on Albrach?
No, sorry, Mrs Williams. All routes for the name still lead back to the Cambridgeshire Collection and the piece of independent research from the 1980s. As Albrach is etymologically nonsensical for its claimed era (says Badger, being very posh and loaded with waffle!), we can only assume the error arose from misreading an old map. Names can be very hard to decipher, and we think that what was interpreted as 'Albrach' is probably a misreading of 'Arbury' or one of its variants.
The placing of the council-named 'King's Hedges Estate' on historically non-King's Hedges land perhaps added to the confusion.
King's Hedges, north of the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, first appeared in print in 1588 as 'Kinges Headge' and was the property of Richard Brakyn. There is no historical evidence of a previous name for the site, nor an 'Albrach' anywhere else in the district, so we cannot include it as verified history.
Professor T McKenny Hughes, who first linked the King's Hedges name to the presence of the hedged hunting warren in the district, wrote a piece for the Cambridge Review in 1897:
We may recall, the gay cavalcade watched from the Castle walls on its way to the King's Hunting Box near the hedges, the winding of the huntsman's horn, and the rush of deer and boar and many another creature that has long vanished from our district.
It's a fascinating piece of English medieval history (Britain as a polity came about much later, during the time of Empire and the union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland) and although hunting as a sport is now often reviled (the Arbury Archivists think it's 'YUCK', to be honest), it is worth remembering that many things commonplace today, and waved through unnoticed, may be reviled by future generations.
'S' enquires: The Meadows is in Arbury, but you never include it. I think that's unfair. Will you?
Yes, indeed, we'd love to include the Meadows. The Archive covers the historic Arbury area, from Carlton Way to King's Hedges Road and across the Guided Busway to what we refer to as 'the real Kings Hedges', the historic fifty eight acres. We refer to North & South Arbury, and the council planners' named King's Hedges Estate as a North Arbury sub-district.
When writing about local history, it becomes confusing and misleading to refer to King's Hedges as anything other than the named property, north of the Busway. One cannot write historically about the fields north of Arbury Road up to the Busway as 'King's Hedges' when historically they weren't.
We also extend into Arbury Camp/Arbury Camp Farm, which is the prehistoric origin of the Arbury name, but we do not include the site's modern development, Orchard Park, as it is a separate community - although if residents of Orchard Park are interested in inclusion here please let us know!
The Meadows is quite a new Arbury development by the Archive's standards, and we shall be writing about the site at some point soon, and if you have any Meadows news or history to include - please get in touch.
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