Alfred Brett was a quiet, studious young man. On leaving St Andrew's School in Chesterton, he got a job as an assistant at an antiques shop in Cambridge and joined the Territorial Army. A postcard to Miss Lily Brett, Manor Farm, Arbury Road, Chesterton, Cambridge. The card came from Claude (Skinner) of the 3rd Norfolk Regiment (then in Felixstowe), a young friend of Lily:  Dear Lilly [sic] , Just a line hoping to find you and all quite safe as it leaves me at present. Tell Jimmy [?] he is a long time writing that letter. I expect Alf is alright. Give my love to all. Glad to hear that your father is better, from yours truly, Claude. Lance Corporal Alfred Brett, son of Richard and Amelia Brett of the Manor Farm, Arbury Road, 'Old Chesterton', was killed in the trenches of World War 1 not long before VE Day. The family - Richard, Amelia, and their ten remaining children - staggered under the blow, and...

                        The two large trees seen here on Campkin Road (opposite Arbury Town Park) were planted in the Manor Farmhouse garden circa the 1930s. There were three of them until recent times. The Manor Farm covered much of North Arbury, with boundaries at Milton Road, Arbury Road, Arbury Camp Farm, the railway tracks, the original (dead end) King's Hedges farm track, which was a private road, and land under separate ownership. One of the farm fields was called 'Arbury' and  another 'Arbury Field'. The Manor Farm was established in the years following the 1840 Chesterton Enclosures. Before that, the land north of Arbury Road was known as the Arbury or Harborough (a variation on the Arbury name) Meadows - which probably explains why Arbury Road was known locally as Arbury Meadow Road for many years. The position of the old Arbury/Harborough Meadows, north of Arbury Road. We've marked on Arbury Court and the Guided...

Photo captioned 'South Arbury homes' from the 'Cambridge Evening News', 1972 - Kingsway Flats, Carlton Way. In more recent years, great kebabs have been sold here. In 1972, I'd never even heard of one! We lived in Cunningham Close on South Arbury, and it surprises a lot of people to hear that, although it was the early 1970s, some people were buying their council houses. Before the 1980s, council houses were sold - it depended on individual councils. In the '80s it simply became a right for all. We didn't buy ours - only a few people in the road were doing that. Quite a lot of people, when they bought their house, would put on a new front door - hard wood, latticed, with a few panes of bullseye glass for a Victorian look perhaps, and might put up a Victorian style lamp by their door. It wasn't that people were desperate to be 'retro' as we call it nowadays - but Victorian style looked 'nice' and 'posh'. Anyway, every decade has i...

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 ...

The Kingsway Flats in South Arbury, built in the mid-1960s, with their hills and silver birches. The hills were a popular destination for bored children in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s - along with the 'The Hump', 'The Seats' and 'The Block'. The Arbury/Harborough Meadows, furlongs and Corner, north of Arbury Road. 'Harborough' was a variation on the Arbury name.  'Cambridge News', 1969: a Roman villa with underfloor heating (a 'hypercaust') has been discovered in the Arbury Meadows north of Arbury Road, soon to be followed by iron age finds. The villa was on the site of Northfield Avenue and King's Hedges School - which is in the city's most historic Arbury area, not King's Hedges, a small farm north of the guided busway. Arbury, circa 1900. Note Arbury Camp and the Manor Farm field names. King's Hedges was a fifty eight acre farm, north of the railway line (guided busway) and King's Hedges Road, redirected and expanded...