Abingdon Shopping Guide

The scouts, and their helpers, are delivering the new Abingdon shopping guide called 'Choose Abingdon' this weekend. It has a colour coded map of town centre shops and businesses.

Not only that, but the scouts were also delivering the Abingdon Town Crier.

(The Town Crier has architects pictures of the County Hall with a glazed in undercroft, and with an external lift. There will be a public meeting on Thursday 18th October at 7:30 PM for the public to find out about these plans.)

Idiots Guide

Daily Mail reporters ought to read this before writing future stories about Abingdon. For the rest of us it is just a reference.

Daily Mail Apathetic Reporting

The Daily Mail has accused Abingdon of being apathetic about its soldiers homecoming.

Yesterday, troops back from their tour of duty in Afghanistan marched to a church service in St Helen’s church at 11 a.m.

I have had to borrow the picture from the Daily Mail web site as I was at work.

They needed something to illustrate what some high up military was saying about the apathy of the general population towards the army serving abroad. These pictures fitted the journalistic brief but they do not fit my knowledge of Abingdon.

Street Fair

Every year we get a similar letter:

Dear Sir/Madam

ABINGDON MICHAELMAS STREET FAIR 2007.

You may be aware that this year's Michaelmas Street Fair will run on 8 and 9 October....

The congestion...may increase slightly the time it takes to respond to your property in the event of a fire... extra vigilent...

...We are aware that the Fair does cause inconvenience to residents. We thankyou in anticipation of you co-operation.

The rides have started arriving. here is one pictured near the Drayton Road Bridge, with the caravans and trailers of fairground people behind.

Come up for air

Abingdon has green river valleys stretching to the town centre.

cleaner red buses with the slogan 'come up for air'

The Abits (Abingdon Integrated Transport Strategy) plan involved holding traffic outside the town centre, and letting it through in a controlled way so that exhaust fumes did not forever pollute the town centre streets. Here at lunchtime, traffic is moving through fairly well, in batches. But later on, at going home time, there was one continuous line of idling traffic along High Street. West St Helen Street was even worse with stationary traffic right back to the church until 7:30 PM.

So come up here for the air, but you'll have to judge whether its safe to inhale..

Better Ways to School

Caldecott Chase borders Caldecott School, and there looks as though there is a new way through the new development to the school.

On the other side of Caldecott School, another back entrance has been laid from Drayton Road. For a long time this has been an overgrown gap between houses.

These back routes to Caldecott School resulted from the Better Ways to School project. The school put together a travel plan about five years ago, to encourage children to walk or cycle, and this is part of the result. Another earlier result was the wooden fences on the grass verge in front of the school. They were put there because cars often drove over the verge, potentially, into the path of school children.

(Cyclists seen at the Abbey Gateway on Sunday have nothing to do with Caldecott but they are nice and colourful.)

Simply Messing about in Boats

Watching some people it seems like there aint nothing '- half as much worth doing as simply messing about in boats' .

This boat called Four Paws heads upstream to Abingdon Lock.

These two people - not youngsters - can be seen messing around near the weir pools.

This Westie knows everything going on round his little riverbank territory.

Caldecott Road - Wet Tar

A week ago and the pavement outside the new flats on Caldecott Road was impassible.

There is new tar on both sides of Caldecott road from the Drayton Road to Blacknall Road.

MG Run to Buckingham Railway Centre

A lot of MG cars came to Abingdon Market Place at around 10:30 this morning, and their owners took the opportunity to visit the MG exhibition in the County Hall, before setting off towards the Buckingham Railway Centre at Quainton, near Waddesdon.

While the cars were there it gave the rest of us a chance to stand and stare.