The new overflow carpark at the White Horse Leisure & Tennis Centre in Abingdon is completed.
Work has now moved to the main car park which, although only just over ten years old, is getting torn up
and the herringbone bricks replaced by tarmac. To me this seems peculiar, but then I wasn’t on the Council committee that decided the change.
To me it looks like the pantomime exchange of ‘new lamps for old’, and such a waste of resources.
The Abingdon Christmas Extravaganza Festival is a month away on Saturday 29th November. The first lights were being put up today in preparation. This included several red and white Christmas Trees down Stert Street, and assorted lights down Bath Street and West St Helen Street.
The larger street decorations will follow in the coming days.
A large number of shops are already well prepared for Christmas. Others will have to first take down Halloween pumpkins before turning on the real glitz for the biggest commercial festival of the year.
The largest of the Radley Gravel Pits was pumped dry at the start of 2004. A fence was erected, and the pit was pumped full of fuel ash slurry from Didcot Power Station.
By the start of 2006 when featured on this blog there stretched a black morass, partly covered by reeds and grass.
A fence still surrounds the area – marked by lifebuoys; but now ten years since the gravel pit was filled, trees have grown to cover about half of the area, and are colonising the other half.
Nearby Thrupp Lake was saved from a similar fate by the Save Radley Lakes campaigners. It had already matured into a lake.
There was a time, not so long ago (probably about 5-6 years), when the Vale of White Horse District Council had a strict policy towards roadside advertising, and local organisations did not feel they could promote their events effectively to passing traffic.
Now the policy seems far more lenient.
The road barrier, left in place because of troubles with the River Stert Culvert underneath, has become the temporary town noticeboard.
You cannot have missed there and elsewhere that Sweet Charity by Abingdon Operatic Society is on this week. The musical at the Amey Theatre follows a dancer through the night clubs of New York in search of love, and includes well known songs such as: ‘Big Spender’, ‘The Rhythm Of Life’ and ‘If My Friends Could See Me Now’.
The system works well enough so long as events are local and are removed soon afterwards – not always the case: Mad Up Reunion in Reading back in May is still up at the end of October on Stratton Way.