What does a blog full of nearly 5 years of photos reveal about its author?

Posted byCambridge Town OwlPosted inUncategorized

Because my brain is frazzled after 46 posts in the first month of 2025, I thought I’d pick out trios of images from the past few years of blogging on this and work out why I put them there

Summer 2020: Owls – can you see where the inspiration from ‘The Cambridge Town Owl’ came from? The one on the right is a European Eagle Owl I met at Thetford Forest

Autumn 2020: I started wondering why so few books educating the public about politics were being published today given that previous generations had the Penguin Specials (see also the RSPCA Bookshop on Mill Road), but the prospect of me a) reading them all and b) trying to get a new generation of them produced, was never going to happen with my CFS/ME

Winter 2020: Me moaning about ugly buildings. Again. Far left – what the Commercial Estates Group have had planned as a speculative development along Babraham Road

Early Spring 2021 – Looking at the revamped Junction plans (since put on hold), and ditto the Cambridge Rowing Lake (still on hold), and a lost community building, the old Hills Road Wesleyan Methodist Church, demolished in the 1970s to make way for a private office block.

Late Spring 2021 – trying to inform the public about some of the very large speculative proposals for house building around Cambridge submitted to the local planning process

Local and Mayoral Elections 2021 – all change at Shire Hall and CPCA Towers

June 2021 – Castle Hill protests. I still think the wider site should be used for an extension to the Museum of Cambridge upon which we can tell the story of our city

Summer 2021: Civic heroes: Social reformer Eglantyne Jebb, Homerton College’s John Horobin, and builder & councillor Kelsey Kerridge.

Late summer 2021 – recalling 2014 with former Cambridge City Council leader Lewis Herbert, explaining how Coleridge Rec ended up with a big dragon slide that is now ten years old

Early Autumn 2021: Three old buildings that should have been saved: The Spillers Mill, burnt down in suspicious circumstances – it should have been rebuilt down to the last moss-covered roof-tile; the old Norwich Union building, where John Lewis now is, and the old Cambridgeshire Regiment’s HQ, inexplicably demolished in the early 1990s, left derelict, and then having an office block built on it, on East Road opposite the Zion Baptist Church

Autumn 2021 – the 1960s and the struggle to improve our city – these from the Cambridgeshire Collection

Early 2022 – me moaning about ugly and/or bland boring buildings in Cambridge, wondering why architects and developers won’t build nice lovely civic buildings like Graz City Hall in Austria above-right

Spring 2022 – Trams, buses, and railways – can we have all of them in an expanded Cambridge? And top class ones too!

May 2022 – looking back at old books to find what we used to have and could have had for public transport

With the Beehive Centre being redeveloped, I looked back at how the once-mighty Cambridge & District Co-op imploded over the creation of this retail park

Civic heroes: Major Arthur Leslie Symonds MP – Cambridge Labour’s first (1945-50), Henry Thomas Hall, radical councillor and benefactor of Cambridge’s first public library, and Sir David Robinson, founder of Robinson College and who’s mother ‘The Rosie’ Maternity Hospital is named after.

Books – whether promoting big stuff, through to being annoying to those in authority, the latter by Mark Thomas

That’s all for now!

But for those of you local to Cambridge who want to talk/moan about politics and democracy, I’ve organised a couple of neighbourhood-level informal gatherings (mainly for people who want to find out more and talk to others who may also have similar concerns.)

If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to: