Roll out the pillar box! 'New Post Office for Arbury Estate', 'Cambridge Evening News', September, 1971. Thanks to Paul who recently sent us some pics of the sadly departed North Arbury Post Office, in Cameron Road. The North Arbury Post Office and Stores opened in September, 1971 - in a building which was intended to be temporary. It was there for around three decades! By 1981, the Stores were part of the Spar chain (remember the slogan, 'So near, so Spar'?) and also supplying hairdressing services for North Arbury! The North Arbury Stores and Post Office, Cameron Road, in the 1990s. Note the high tec 'Phonecards' phone box to the right! The first phone card boxes had arrived in the 1980s. The National Lottery - a 1990s innovation - had also arrived by the time this photograph was taken. Thanks again to Paul. Photographs like these are just what we're looking for - they help the Archive tremendously. We'll trawl the 'CEN' archive for mor...

Photo captioned 'Flooding at North Arbury, 1970'. The children are having fun! Well, here's North Arbury in flood in 1970! We'll have more on this soon. Note the dear old Jenny Wren on the left - and we've got more on that too! Why 'Jenny Wren'? We'll have the details. South Arbury had the Carlton and the Snowcat public houses, which opened within a couple of weeks of each other in 1959, but for years North Arbury had only the Jenny. Until 1974 - in May the  Cambridge Evening News reported:  Residents of the North Arbury estate did not need a heat wave to remind them of their need for another pub and the opening of The Ship will meet with eager response. Campaigners for real  ale will be pleased to find that Wells of Bedford are making this their fourth Cambridge pub,  providing beer connoisseurs with their prize-winning bitter as well as a wide range of other beers, wines and spirits in spacious new premises... The opening of the Ship in Northfield Aven...

Ah, the days of fund raising for the Arbury Adventure Playground on the Nun's Way playing field! Having somewhere safe and supervised for the many children of the district to play was a very high priority. In 1970, 'Arbury's marathon singer' Tony Coleno of Cameron Road, made a record-breaking contribution to the funds... Arbury's marathon singer, Tony Coleno, slept for 18 hours last night after breaking the world record for solo non-stop singing by 12 minutes. He sang from 8 am on Saturday until 11.15 am on Sunday. Mr Coleno, of 46 Cameron Road, survived on a diet of soft drinks and beverages, chewing gum, indigestion tablets and throat spray, and raised almost £100 for the Arbury Adventure Playground Association. The marathon took place at the Jenny Wren public house, Campkin Road. The landlady, Mrs Valerie McCord, said today: 'He was really marvellous, fresh as a daisy even at the end. 'On Saturday night, when he'd been singing for 13 hours, he got up ...

So, having missed out on the archaeological digs at Arbury Camp, we're busy digging up artefacts from the Arbury Estate and the three Arbury farms of yore  - Arbury Camp, Hall, and Manor. For our new selection, we begin with the religious text above, which used to hang in Mrs Amelia Brett's bedroom at the Manor Farm on Arbury 'Meadow' Road. The text was apparently obtained from a seed catalogue, about 120 years ago and framed between glass and board with a paper tape called 'passe partout'. If you applied water to this, it stuck like crazy, and came in a range of colours and finishes to give an attractive framed effect in the days before easily affordable mass-produced frames. Amelia's place of religious worship was the Wesley Chapel, in High Street, Chesterton, and she was also a member of the Mothers' Union at the village's St Andrew's Church, where she was laid to rest in 1924. We have several pages of complete transcripts of conversations of ...

So, via Sara Payne's Down Your Street visit to Carlton Way in 1981, our own memories, and our (mostly previously unpublished) transcripts from the Arbury 1980 project, we're back in the original South Arbury's main street for a further look at its history. Carlton Way did not, of course, arrive all at the same time. While Arbury School opened in 1956, the Carlton Arms public house wasn't built until the late 1950s, for instance. It opened in 1959 - complete with its cosy off licence. Happy memories from years gone by of being taken to the Carlton Arms off licence to buy crisps and fizzy pop on summer evenings in the late 1960s, and also to return Gran and Grandad's Guinness bottles to get the deposit back for 'sweeties' a few years later, make one of our Arbury Archivists go 'all misty-eyed' over this picture. The Carlton Terrace shops were a 1960s innovation. Looking back to the 1970s days of Dean's, Blackwell's, Yarrow's (Yarrer's...

'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 Cheste...