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 acres 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 ...

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. ...