The town seemed nice and busy this morning with lots of people out shopping.

At the Market Place end the friends of Stowford House were selling jumble to raise money to give learning disabled children outings and the like. From what I gather they have failed in their attempts to save most of Stowford House, a mile away from Abingdon in Shippon. It is a hostel for learning disabled, and now has only five clients.

Next to them some people were promoting the Alpha Course with the help of this car. The Alpha course is a chance to find out about Christianity through guided discussion. David Frost did a documentary about it some years ago.

And at the other end of the Market Place, Phil from the Abbey Baptists was letting rip with some open air preaching. I was given a tract saying ‘Time to think about the Big Questions?‘

The Ock Street exhibition at the Trinity Church Hall is here at last. The exhibition poster is tied alongside the Make Poverty History banner.

At the exhibition, I first listened to a recorded interview telling of harder times in Ock Street. The bread man would often be owed money by people. But still he could not let them go without bread. Poverty like that has been made history in Ock Street.

This lady is Ock Street born, and bred. She stands in front of a board saying Ock Street 1910. That was 8 years before she was born. She lived at 232 Ock Street.

Back in the early 1900s about a third of the population of Abingdon lived around Ock Street, until the slum clearances of the 1930s.

The exhibiton has been magnificently collated and staged by Abingdon Area Archaeological and Historical Society (Aaahs). They were pleasantly suprised at how popular it has been. There have been over 250 people on the first day. For anybody who wants, there are folders and computers and CDs to trawl through.

This exhibiton board is called Nonconformist Chapels. Ock Street used to have lots of chapels, pubs, shops, minor industries, and of course dwellings. But now it looks more like this old linked post.

On the way home, I dropped in at the newest shop on Ock Street. Its been there about two months and is called the Traditional Afro-Caribbean & Continental shop. There were two young ladies serving at the counter. One was braiding the others hair. (This is the premises recently vacated by The Movies .) I bought a bottle of Mega Malt (a non alcoholic malt drink) from their fridge. Not bad!

I’m not sure whether it will happen at the dead of night or in the early hours. But we will go to sleep with one way traffic on Stratton Way and wake to two way.

The covers will come off all the new traffic lights. The red lights have been shining through the covers for some days now.

The covers will come off all the new bus stops along Stratton Way and the new stops ‘go live’ from start of service on Monday 2nd October. It is intended that the services will stop as shown in the following list, but I’m not sure yet if all of that starts on Monday.

A1 Stratton Way – direction Vineyard (31, 31A, 32, 33, N33, 34, 41, 42, 44, 44A)
A2 Stratton Way – direction Vineyard (X3, X4)
A3 Stratton Way – direction Vineyard (4, 4B, 35, 35A, 35B)
A4 Stratton Way – direction Ock Street (31, 33, 34, 35A, 35B, N31, N32)
A5 War Memorial – direction Marcham Road and Stratton Way (4, 4B, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 44A, 46, 48, 49A, 218, X15)
A6 West St Helens Street – direction Marcham Road and Stratton Way (40)
A7 High Street – No layover anymore at this stop (33, 35, X3, X4)
A8 Bridge Street – direction Culham (32, 46, X15)
A9 Stert Street – Set down only Town Services Only (41, 42)
A10 Vineyard – direction Stert Street, Stratton Way (no change)
A11 Vineyard – direction Oxford Road, Radley Road (no change)
A12 Bath Street – direction Stratton Way (no change)
A13 Bath Street – direction Wootton Road (no change)

The annual brain drain from Abingdon has just happened with some of Abingdon’s brightest going

to Aberdeen
to Abertay
to Aberystwyth
to Aston
to Bangor
to Bath
to Belfast
to Birmingham
to Bolton
to Bournemouth
to Bradford
to Brighton
to Bristol
to Brunel
to Buckingham
to Cambridge
to Canterbury
to Cardiff
to Carlisle
to Cheltenham
to Chester
to Colchester
to Coventry
to Cranfield
to Derby
to Dundee
to Durham
to Edinburgh
to Exeter
to Glasgow
to Guildford
to Hatfield
to Huddersfield
to Hull
to Inverness
to Keele
to Lampeter
to Lancaster
to Leeds
to Leicester
to Lincoln
to Liverpool
to London
to Loughborough
to Luton
to Manchester
to Milton Keynes
to Newcastle
to Newport
to Northampton
to Norwich
to Nottingham
to Oxford
to Paisley
to Plymouth
to Pontypridd
to Portsmouth
to Preston
to Reading
to Salford
to Sheffield
to Slough
to Southampton
to St.Andrews
to Staffordshire
to Stirling
to Sunderland
to Swansea
to Teesside
to Ulster
to Warwick
to Winchester
to Wolverhampton
to Worcester
to York

and possibly further field. This year for the first time they are having to pay £3,000 a year University tuition fees. Last year it was £1,000.

And here is one of the many young Abingdonians looking out of the bedroom window from the University Hall of Residence for the first time. Freshers often get into Halls, but then have to find their own accomodation in the following years.