Category: Issues

Posted on

Are you concerned about the proposed redevelopment of Arbury Court?

Are you concerned about the proposed redevelopment of Arbury Court?

Do you support or oppose the Council’s intention to build six storey flats on Arbury Court Play Area. 

If so, let Cambridge City Council know.

The opportunities for doing so are coming up and the time scale short, see below.

You can fill in the survey, see below.

And you can attend one of the consultation events.

The first one is next Monday, 17th of November, at Akeman Community Centre from 6pm onwards, see below.

We are now moving into the next stage of the North Cambridge Framework for Change project, and we are inviting you to provide feedback on our plans to build 200+ new council homes and 200+ new private homes in the area, with Arbury Court shopping and community facilities redeveloped, and improvements made to local public spaces and parks.

Over the past year, hundreds of residents, organisations and community groups have told us about ageing homes, safety concerns, open spaces that feel under-used, and the need for better connections between neighbourhoods.

That feedback has directly shaped a draft plan that includes:

• Taking down existing homes and commercial premises at Arbury Court and replacing them with over 100 new council homes and over 100 new private homes – including more accessible homes for people with disabilities – as well as new commercial units for existing Arbury Court traders to move into and new community facilities including the library. The current park will be replaced with more space for new park and play areas, which will be at the centre of the new Arbury Court.

• Regenerating the Kingsway council estate, replacing existing homes with 99 new council homes and 98 new private homes, with a better arrangement of open and green spaces. The proposals also include redeveloping a number of homes on nearby Brackley Close, Rutland Close and Verulam Way.

• Enhancing parks and green spaces across the north of the city to make them safer and more accessible, increasing biodiversity, and planting trees and shrubs – initially at Arbury Park and the open space Kingsway, with a longer-term focus on Pulley Park, Nun’s Way recreation ground and Arbury Town Park.

• Working with the Highways Authority for safer streets, better crossings and improved travel connections, including the Arbury Court and Kingsway link.


During the course of the engagement period, we’ll share these proposals in more detail and ask for your views on the priorities for areas like Arbury Court and Kingsway. Your input will help refine the final version of the Framework before it is adopted.

Have your say
Our latest survey is open until Tuesday 16 December.
• Fill in the survey 📝

We are also hosting a series of community conversations in the coming weeks, which you can register for on our engagement platform:
• Akeman Community Centre on Monday 17 November from 5 to 6.30pm
• Meadows Community Centre on Saturday 22 November from 11am to 12.30pm
• Online webinar on Thursday 27 November from 5.30 to 7.30pm
• Brown’s Field Community Centre on Monday 1 December from 5.30 to 7pm

📧 Email your thoughts to northcambridge@engagecf.co.uk

📞 Call to give feedback on 01223 650 550

Your voice matters — help shape the future of north Cambridge.
Kind regards,
The North Cambridge Framework for Change project team

Posted on

STOP PRESS: Start of Residents Parking Scheme delayed yet again

We know that some of you are worried that work on the Residents’ Parking Scheme could start while you are away on summer holiday next month.

We have recently heard from our Local County Councillor, Ian Manning, about the start date for this work.

He has informed us:

“The most recent I’ve had from the project team is August/September and I have asked for sufficient notice that I can get another letter out, and organise more public meetings before anything starts.”

This seems to suggest that nothing is imminent.

If we can manage to get any firmer information, we will let you know.

ARERA Committee

Posted on

Plans for the Residents’ Parking Scheme

To all who live on or off Arbury Road east

PLEASE CHECK THE ATTACHED  DRAWINGS to find out what will be happening outside where you live.

We have just (yesterday) been sent the attached set of plans for the Residents’ Parking Scheme.

MRA RPS 190625Download

It was sent by Clare Rankin who is the County Council’s Principal Active Travel officer – i.e. it was not provided by the Greater Cambridge Partnership but by a council official.

(The drawings are dated February 2025 so it isn’t clear why the GCP hasn’t released them to us long ago.)

The set of road plans shows what the GCP is going to start implementing some time next month.

Although labelled ‘detailed’ by WSP, the engineering consultancy working for the GCP, the drawings remain very difficult to interpret.

You only need to look at pages 2 and 3 which cover Arbury Road east.

You will need to use this key to decipher what is meant.

Those of you who live on the north side of Arbury Road east (even numbers) will see that the northern boundary does seem to include your side of the road (but not your properties?) – it is difficult to tell from the level of detail provided.

As expected, no parking bays are being installed on the northern side of the road, just double yellow lines.

If you have concerns about this, please contact your local councillors ASAP – addresses shown in cc’d above.

Ian Manning is our local County Council whom you should expect to represent you on highways-related issues which are the responsibility of the County Council.

Those of you who live on the south side of Arbury Road east (odd numbers), please check the drawings to make sure you understand what is happening directly outside where you live.

If you have any concerns, again, please contact Ian Manning.

If you do contact him, please copy ARERA in via info@arera.org.uk to share your concerns.

You can also contact us via ARERA’s website where we are going to  post this information so that it can be accessed by those who aren’t ARERA members, 

Contact ARERA arera.org.uk

Ian Cooper

Committee member, Arbury Road East Residents Association

Posted on

North Cambridge Framework for Change (survey)

Open for comments from Wednesday 7 May to Wednesday 18 June.

Cambridge City Council wants to work with the local community to shape a Framework for Change for north Cambridge.

This framework builds on previous work, including the recently adopted North Cambridge neighbourhoods Design Code, which established principles for the area based on the community’s priorities.

The framework will guide improvements to homes, streets, green spaces, and local business and community facilities in Arbury, King’s Hedges and Chesterton. Hearing from local people will be vital.

This survey is part of a wider programme of engagement including workshops, pop-ups, school sessions, and interviews. It gives you the opportunity to share your thoughts, ideas, and concerns to help shape the future of these neighbourhoods.

The framework will consider themes including:

  • older council housing estates
  • parks and green spaces
  • Arbury Court and the surrounding community facilities
  • streets and travel

https://engage.cambridge.gov.uk/en-GB/folders/north-cambridge-framework-for-change

Please do complete this survey if you have time. Plus you can add comments onto the map.

Have your say

Complete the engagement survey or comment on interactive map.

From Wednesday 7 May to Wednesday 18 June 2025, the council invite all residents to participate in a series of workshops, community conversations and online forums designed to gather ideas and feedback.

These sessions will allow participants to learn more about the project and share their thoughts.

To request the survey in another format, please contact communications@cambridge.gov.uk.

Hard copy surveys are available at Arbury Court Library, Meadows Community Centre and all drop-in events.

Email northcambridge@engagecf.co.uk to request materials in other languages.

Posted on

Creating a cleaner, safer Arbury Road: donate NOW via the Big Give Green Match Fund by CamCycle

Ros Lund and the Arbury Road East Residents’ Association (ARERA) have been campaigning for a cleaner, safer street for several years now. They’d like to see the eastern end of Arbury Road become a more welcoming and attractive place for people walking, wheeling and cycling with less traffic, lower speeds and reduced air pollution.

Camcycle have been supporting ARERA with various aspects of their work, providing technical and campaigning advice, helping them apply for Local Highway Improvement Funding, conduct community engagement exercises, meet councillors and visualise ideas.

We work with groups like this across Cambridgeshire to help deliver routes that help more people choose active travel for their daily journeys, reducing carbon emissions and improving air quality and health for all.

We’re fundraising for this work now via The Big Give Green Match Fund. Donate today and DOUBLE your donation, helping achieve double the impact in a community near you.

It only takes 2 minutes to give at camcycle.org.uk/BigGreenGive2025.

Camcycle

Posted on

Current state of play on the residents’ parking scheme and future steps

We have been asked to share the slides shown at our AGM on 12th of February about the residents’ parking scheme.

If, when you have had a chance to look through them, you have any questions or comments, please could you use the contact page on this website to do so?

File : Agenda item 5.1 Milton Road Area Residents’ Parking  Scheme 2020-25 – Update on current state of play and next steps

Contact ARERA

Posted on

Residents’ Parking Scheme: what we now know (and still don’t)

Residents’ Parking Scheme: what we now know (and still don’t)

We have been asked if we could write a short piece, in plain English, about where we are on the Residents’ Parking Scheme.

Here goes ….. two versions – a simpler and a more complicated one.


Simpler version
_______________

1. The Residents’ Parking Scheme is going to be implemented.

2. The County Council decided on September 16th to go ahead (they just haven’t got round to informing affected residents or businesses yet).

3. The County’s Head of Parking and Traffic Management has told us that she doesn’t know when scheme will be implemented. This decision rests with the Greater Cambridge Partnership.

4. The scheme will be implemented just as described in the information issued in the spring – despite the 288 objections recorded by residents and businesses about what was proposed.

5. Because of these objections, the scheme will be run as a pilot for the first six months.

6. At the end of this period, the scheme will be reviewed.

7. If elements of the scheme are found not to be working well, they could be altered. (BUT see more complicated version below.)

8. An email link is going to be set up to allow residents and businesses to comment on the scheme’s operation during the pilot period.

9. So do use this channel if you feel that you have been adversely affected by how the scheme works once implemented.


More complicated version
________________________

1 & 2 above. The decision to go ahead with the Parking Scheme has been taken as an executive decision by Jeremy Smith, Interim Assistant Director, Transport Strategy and Network Management following a resolution (see attachment) to:

“Recommend that the Executive Director of Place and Economy, in consultation with local Members, approve the introduction of the Milton Road Area Residential Parking Scheme, as published;
and
Approve a review of on-street parking in the affected area six months after the Residential Parking Scheme commences operation.”

“The local Members either attended or were invited to the CJAC meeting. Given the political sensitivity of this item, the Chair and Vice Chair of Highways & Transport Committee have been given the opportunity to ask that the matter be referred to that committee, but have not made such a request.”

So the decision on whether to implement the scheme has not had to wait until the next meeting of the Highways and Transport Committee in December as we were previously advised.

It has already been taken by a County Council Officer. The H&T Committee has chosen not to ‘call this decision in’ despite (or perhaps because) it is ‘politically sensitive’.

Note too the suggestion that our locally elected have been consulted about this. None of them has contacted our residents’ association about this.

4. The only one of the 288 objections to scheme recorded in the attached document – ‘Cambridgeshire County Council Record of Officer Delegated Decision taken following consideration by Cambridge Joint Area Committee’ – deals with exclusion of properties on the northern boundary of Arbury Road, see attached report.

Note that “no other options were considered.”

5 & 6 & 7 & 8 above. The Cambridge Joint Area Committee recommended in July that “a thorough review be carried out 6-month after implementation to assess on-street parking in the area. Should it be deemed that sufficient parking capacity exists to accommodate additional the parked vehicles generated by Arbury Road properties, including Havenfield, then a proposal to amend the Milton RPS will be pursued.”

This recommendation did not meet with our request that the performance of the scheme during six month pilot should be actively monitored by an independent third party.

HOWEVER ….

Through protracted correspondence with County Council Officers, we have found out that our Residents’ Parking Scheme has been set up using a PERMANENT Traffic Regulation Order.

The procedure for a PERMANENT TRO does not allow for a trial period or for subsequent changes.

If, after the trial period introduced by the County Council, changes – such as that quoted above from the report attached – are deemed necessary, then the existing TRO cannot be amended.

Instead it will have to be revoked.

And then a new TRO will have to issued in line with Department of Transport’s regulations which appear to require that a new consultation will have to be conducted once a new TRO has been issued.

_______________________________________

AND SO ……..

Given the complexity surrounding the introduction of the Residents’ Parking Scheme, ARERA is committed to keeping a close watching brief on what is happening.

This is not easy given the inadequate/tardy information issued by both the County Council and by the Greater Cambridge Partnership.


If you have any queries, please let us know.

If you hear of anything that we need to be aware of, please let us know.

If you have any concerns about what is happening, please send them to your local elected councillors (details on ARERA’s web site).

ARERA Committee

240916 Delegated Decision Record – Milton Road Residential Parking SchemeDownload
Posted on

Imminent County Council decisions affecting Arbury Road East

Much has been happening over the summer that will have significant impacts on Arbury Road East.

Decisions about whether a new zebra crossing will provided, under the Local Highways Improvement Programme (LHIP), and about the implementation of the Milton Road Area Residents Park Scheme, are imminent.

These decisions will be made at two meetings of the County Council’s Highways and Transport Committee (H&TC) to be held during the first week of October.

We have been trying to get access to the agenda papers for these two meetings to find out what is being proposed.

We were treated kindly by the Cambridge Joint Area Committee when we were invited in July to make submissions to it in support of our LHIP submission. But we have been unable to discover what recommendation it made about our proposed zebra cross to the H&TC which is going to make a decision about on October 1st. We have been told that no minutes of the CJAC meeting were made.

At a separate meeting, the CJAC recommended acceptance of the Greater Cambridge Partnership’s (GCP) proposals for our area’s residents parking scheme, despite the 288 objections made about it.

And this recommendation was made by the committee despite the public statement given our former councillor Jocelynne Scutt, who was the chair of the CJAC at the time of the GCP’s ‘consultation’ on the scheme in 2022. She publicly stated, as we consistently maintained, that the GCP had not provided information making clear that the north (even numbers side) of Arbury Road East would be excluded from the parking scheme.

The CJAC is recommending to the H&TC that the six-month trial of parking scheme, as described in the Traffic Regulation Order published in the Spring, should go ahead with the provisos that:
1.  a detailed evaluation should be made of the scheme at the end of the trial period
And
2. an online channel of communications should be set up so that residents and businesses can log their experiences during the trial,

ARERA has requested that the evaluation and the communications channel should be provided by independent third parties because of the GCP’s dire performance to date in relation to the parking scheme.

This all sounds very bureaucratic – because it is.

But this won’t make the consequences of decisions about to be taken any the less significant for those of us who live and work on Arbury Road East.

We will let you know when the committee papers for the two H&T committee meetings next month become available – in case you want to make your own representations to the committees.

And we will let you know the outcomes of the decisions the two meetings make as soon as they become available.

Posted on

Traffic counting equipment on Arbury Road East

You may have noticed the traffic counting equipment that has been installed outside the North Cambridge Academy.

We have put in a request to the County Council’s Highways Department asking what the purpose of this data collection is and how any data collected will be used.

If and when we get a reply, we will let you know.

Posted on

Judgement published on proposed new zebra crossing on Arbury Road east.

The summary report by the County Council’s Highways Officer who examined the feasibility of the proposed new zebra crossing for Arbury Road east has been released as an agenda paper for the Council meeting which will decide whether it should go ahead.

This meeting will now be held on the 25th of July.

Applications for funding are rated using a traffic light system.

Against all bar one of the reporting criteria the application for the zebra crossing has been rated as amber.

Against ‘deliverability’, it has been rated as red.

These ratings make it appear highly unlikely that the zebra crossing will be funded.

This is reinforced by the very high cost that the County Council has attached to providing a ‘raised’ crossing, as advised to ARERA by Camcycle.

The summary report to the committee is incorrect when it says that the introduction of a modal filter on Arbury Road east lacked support from local residents.

Our 2019-20 survey showed that this was not the case.

The summary report does, however, keep alive the hope that the County Council may yet deliver a “Future phase of cycle route improvements” on Arbury Road east.