With the summer holidays beginning, what could you do as an Arbury child in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s? Well, the Arbury Adventure Playground, off Wagstaff Close on the Nun's Way playing field, was a bit of a wow. And you could think yourself lucky you lived in Arbury - it was the only Cambridge City housing estate to have an adventure playground - and all provided by local residents' fund raising and campaigning and council grants to keep it going! Graham Odd, of the Cambridge Evening News , popped in on 23 July, 1979: It is the start of an intensive six-week season at the Arbury Adventure Playground. Between 150 and 300 children will daily pour into the 1.25 acre enclosure off Wagstaff Close. The sound of a bell rose above the bleating of goats and the crowing of cockerels in North Arbury this morning, and a crowd of children gathered to plan their summer adventures. In itself, the idea of an adventure playground is no longer startling. They are dotted all over the country a...

       It's September 1962 and Cable Television has arrived in Cambridge! Come and see this miracle of modern technology via the WONDERFUL MOBILE TV DISPLAY at the Ramsden Square exit on Milton Road or, for us Arburyites, on the Arbury North Estate by the flats at Camkin [sic] Road.  Coming into Arbury via the original Arbury Road junction with Histon Road in the early to mid 1970s would have given you a view of electricity pylons, hedgerows, allotments, perhaps a few sheep, and the fields of Arbury Camp Farm. If you were hoping for a romantic view of lovely orchards from the Chivers days (Orchard Park) or the ancient Arbury Camp, well, you would have passed the site but they were long gone. Particularly the Arbury Camp, of course, being prehistoric - at least a couple of thousand years before the Chivers orchards. Ahem. I think I'm beginning to get off the point... The impact of the A45/A14, including the major extension and redirection of King's Hedges Road, ...

Bizarrely, in recent years, efforts at building a sense of community in Arbury have been replaced by rejecting the name as something beyond redemption and replacing it with 'North Cambridge'. People try to sell their houses under this name, and the Manor School, named after the Manor Farm, which carried the Arbury name within its boundaries in the form of two large fields - 'Arbury' and 'Arbury Field' - has also been eradicated and replaced by the 'North Cambridge Academy'.  Much of this former farm land, which forms what is logically and historically North Arbury, was lumped into the new King's Hedges electoral ward (formed out of the northern part of the original Arbury ward) in the mid-1970s by the city council and a new County Council electoral division in 1985, although King's Hedges -  a fifty eight acre farm - was on the northern side of King's Hedges Road - and the original road simply led to it.  The land north of Arbury Road, plus ...