Author Archives: Backstreeter

Path Clearance and Path Blocking

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Cut Bushes
There is a stack like a large bonfire in the field alongside Mill Road and by the River Ock.
Cut Bushes
A nearby footpath easily gets grown over, and the stack appears to be the cuttings, chippings and choppings.
Cut Bushes
During the first lockdown part of the walk had been fenced off and now the dogleg path round some garden decking has been reinstated.

We walked it yesterday. It is narrow and so not ideal in these social distance days but we got all the way without meeting anybody.
Cut Bushes
On the way home I read a couple of notices stuck to a car windscreen. The car was parked against a kerb lowered to allow wheelchair access.

It is easily done in error but is more than a moral issue. Rule 243 of the Highway Code identifies where you are not allowed to park. One of the restrictions is that you can’t part where the kerb is lowered to provide easier access for wheelchairs and powered mobility vehicles.

Abingdon on Ebay and Etsy Today

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There are many Abingdon artifacts on the online auction sites Ebay and Etsy. To buy them would bring them back to Abingdon where they started out. Here are just a small sample of what was on offer.
Cut Trees
This postcard was posted in 1910 and is from a picture by Warland Andrew. The Mayor and Council are on a raised platform on Abingdon Market Place. Before them are three men in uniform with pith helmets. Some people have umbrellas. I don’t know the event.
Cut Trees
A stoneware ginger beer bottle from W Barnett Junior.
Cut Trees
A tailors clothing brush from around 1920 with Advertising for E.H. Beesley Tailor, Hatter & Outfitter.
Cut Trees
The photograph of an assured lady taken at the studio of James Brewerton, 17 High Street.

Chinese workers in Abingdon Cemetery from the First World War

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Cut Trees
During the First World War there was a need for labour as part of the war effort, and many Chinese Mariners served on UK vessels. Some of these became stranded in the UK and found other work. Two such men have been buried together at the bottom of the Spring Road Cemetery in Abingdon. Anne sent me an email asking whether, in these days of pandemic, they had been victims of the influenza pandemic.

An article in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch Vol. 60 (2020), titled The Chinese mariners of the First World War, says that there were 67 Influenza fatalities recorded among Chinese Mariners, serving on UK vessels, all but one after July 1918.

Muk Cheung, of Bao’an, an area of the city of Shenzhen, worked at the stores depot at Milton Barracks, and died in Abingdon Cottage Hospital of pneumonia on February 10th 1918, aged 31 years.

Ah Fook, possibly of Hong Kong, worked at the stores depot at Milton Barracks, and died in Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, of an aneurysm on April 13th 1918, aged 33 years.

More on the cut trees and destruction of wildlife habitats

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Cut Trees
After yesterday’s walk we visited the other bank of the River Thames to look closer at the large area of trees that had been cut down last month. The map above gives an idea of their location.
Cut Trees
The area beyond the tumbledown picnic benches used to be trees.
Cut Trees
This picture gives another view, with the piles of stacked tree trunks in the distance.

Tuckwells were granted permission to extract minerals in 1971 from a number of areas on Thrupp Farm, including the field called Nyatt [Area 5]. They excavated minerals from all the other areas but not Area 5. More recently they have been extracting minerals from Sutton Wick, south of Abingdon.

During an enquiry in 2019 their spokesperson said they still intended to extract minerals from Area 5 in future. The record of the discussion is at https://mycouncil.oxfordshire.gov.uk/mgAi.aspx?ID=20620. Local people wanted the area left undisturbed.
Cut Trees
The area not only includes meadows and trees but also a small lake, all of which had become a habitat for wildlife.