Author Archives: Cambridge Town Owl

The Greater Cambridge Partnership is consulting (again) on something that really should have been something they should have dealt with years ago. You can read their consultation on Hills Road, Cambridge here – on the northern section between Parker’s Piece junction (next to where I want Florence Ada Keynes’ new concert hall) down to HillsContinue reading “How to solve a problem like Hills Road (the road), Cambridge”

Residents of Abbey and Arbury demonstrated what can be achieved with large neighbourhood-level events that bring along city-wide organisations to hold stalls The Arbury Carnival is something of an institution in itself given how long it has been going for. How the estate came to be is described in the Arbury Blogspot video below AboveContinue reading “‘Carnival d’Arbury’ and ‘Shiny AbbeyPeople’ – neighbourhood summer celebrations”

Or a once in a [insert time period of choice] chance, but the slow, painful implosion of the party in government has delivered some political events that future historians and students of politics may be writing essays about for years to come. And yet under a year ago, one recent broadcast outlet ran with thisContinue reading “A once-in-a-lifetime chance to reset UK politics?”

Well… about 979 of you responded one way or another – which in itself reflects how fragmented and broken our civic consultation systems are You can read the report here, and also browse through the background here. In case you missed it or weren’t aware, Cambridge City Council has its own consultations portal at https://cambridge.citizenlab.co/en-GB/Continue reading “What you told Cambridge City Council about our city in Spring 2023”

Deadline for submissions – 07 July 2023 with the overarching theme being Creativity Unwrapped (although in reality you can pitch up almost any idea!) See the full details of Open Cambridge here. If you have your own idea or proposal, get in touch with Open Cambridge’s organisers here. I’ve presented local history-related events in theContinue reading “Open Cambridge 2023 – what event ideas do you have for this autumn’s programme?”

A takeaway from Cambridge student activists at Cambridge Land Justice earlier this evening. You can find Cambridge Land Justice on FB here, and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/camlandjustice. Some of you may have spotted their stall at the Strawberry Fair on Midsummer Common. I was reminded of how aged I felt when several of the undergraduatesContinue reading “Decision-making on the future of Cambridge must be intergenerational or it will fail our city”

This is from one of the submissions (I wrote a guide on how to explore this here) in the call for sites a few years ago. Above – a concept map for North Cambourne – east and west “Nice of the owners and developers to do a large public engagement exercise before drawing up theirContinue reading “Someone snapped up the rights to build on fields north of Cambourne ages ago”

Which could be an interesting one for the incumbent MP for South Cambridgeshire to debate with the voters at the next general election – only he’s staked his political career on opposing such large housing developments. You can see the table below – one which I threw in at the end of an earlier postContinue reading “Cambourne’s population to rise to 55,000 people by 2050 according to East West Rail technical report 2023”

Developers for the proposed North East Cambridge site (where the sewage works currently is) were at the Strawberry Fair – and so were Save Honey Hill campaigners opposing them, as this year’s event reflected a rapidly-changing Cambridge If you want to get a feel for Cambridge’s radical edge, go to the Strawberry Fair. The firstContinue reading “Honey Hill and Hartree at the Strawberry Fair, Cambridge 2023”

A rallying call from former UK diplomat Alexandra Hall Hall (she has an interesting family tale about the origins of her double-surname) matches those coming from the communities and local government sectors about overhauling our internal institutions, how we are governed, and how we hold accountable those who do the governing. The context is nationalContinue reading ““Let us begin our process of renewal and growth where it always should have started – here, at home, among ourselves””