Arbury Summer 2026 Update: A Rubikian Puzzle at the Kingsway Flats, Tesco's Arrival in Campkin Road, An Enquiry from The Meadows, 'You Can't Call Arbury Arbury!' 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!), 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.
And a final comment from Caroline:
On all this confusion over names I remember years ago when they were going to call Orchard Park Arbury Park, the King's Hedges Councillor got up on her high horse and said they couldn't call things Arbury that weren't Arbury. Considering that was the site of the prehistoric camp, I laughed. She also said it was on the Impington border. It's in Impington, and the Arbury Meadows and Arbury Road stretched into Cambridge. King's Hedges wasn't in Cambridge either but the council still called land King's Hedges when it wasn't King's Hedges but the Arbury Meadows. I wrote to her very nicely saying, "You can't call something King's Hedges when it's not King's Hedges", kind of quoting her logic, but she never replied. Demonizing names and knowing nothing about local history are not great qualities for being a local councillor. She left long ago I think, but this lot are just the same with their Albrach Court, when Albrach didn't even exist. You might as well not bother recording local history round here because the council don't respect it - it's not as if we're somewhere posh is it?
I do remember that. Yes, it was very funny as she was photographed on the Arbury prehistoric site saying the name was 'daft' for that location! It was up to the residents of the new development to rename it if they wanted to, which they did and had a perfect right to do, it was nothing to do with Cambridge city ward councillors. But it will always be the prehistoric site of Arbury Camp, hence the naming of Ring Fort Road, which preserves the shape of the eastern side of the enclosure (more here).
We have had great support from some councillors in the past, including Alex Collis and Hilary Cox Condron, so it's not all bad. We enjoy recording accurate local history, we love Arbury and believe the name, with its link back to prehistoric times, is very important, and we still have quite a lot of transcripts and manuscripts from people who participated in the Archive project years ago - so on we go.
It does seem that nonsensical, top down re-wardings and re-brandings are quite in vogue and have been for years, but we can still record what actually is or was for us everyday folk and what is historically true. You cannot logically put up public displays claiming a Roman villa was found at King's Hedges when it wasn't. Both King's Hedges and the villa are historic entities, and the villa was not found at King's Hedges, it was found in the fields north of the historic Arbury Road.
Shifting historic names around to suit council planners and electoral wards results in misinformation when local history is studied. More about the Arbury Roman villa here.
Unravelling the past is fascinating, and we love people getting in touch with new information or images. Ms Rebecca Downham contacted us last year, which resulted in one of our favourite articles, as transcripts of conversations with her late step-father were in the Arbury Archive, and we were able to share them with her and our online community, and she shared photographs of rural Arbury we'd never seen before with us. Things like this give the Arbury Archive real, human meaning, which goes way beyond any artificial fragmentation of the area. Keep smiling!
Hoping everybody is having a good summer - we'll be back soon!
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