In The Meadows at Abbey Fields, the David Wilson Homes development, several of the roads are named after businesses with long associations with Abingdon. A new one to me is Holmes Mews.

Percy Holmes was Mayor of Abingdon in 1953 and belonged to a family long associated with the town through P. Holmes & Son, bakers with shops in Ock Street and Bath Street.

Nearby in The Meadows is a new children’s play area. When I visited last summer it was still behind fencing. It has now opened.

On the neighbouring Abbey Fields estate, a Barratt Homes development, are a couple of other road names that seem to be fairly new. One of these is Crane Avenue. Rhoda Crane, known as Sue, served as a town councillor from 1987 to 1995 and was Mayor of Abingdon in 1993–94. She took a particular interest in town twinning.

Another is Pickering Close. Dorothea Pickering was an educator and spiritual pioneer in Abingdon. She bought a house in East St Helen Street and moved her preparatory school there from The Vineyard, where it continued until 1967. In the 1970s she re-imagined the house as a spiritual centre, naming it St Ethelwold’s after the Abbot of Abingdon Abbey.

Before the Radley Reach development, a public footpath ran from Twelve Acre Drive, through woodland and across open fields, to the hilltop walk between Lodge Hill and Radley College. During construction, the original entrance was fenced off and a diversion put in place.

Today I noticed the original entry point from Twelve Acre Drive is open again. The path passes through woodland and along the new streets of Monastery Garden and Prior Close, with signs marked Public Right of Way – Footpath Route.

However, the route doesn’t connect up yet. At the end of Prior Close it runs into an active building site, which a workman confirmed is not open to the public.

For now, walkers still need to use the original diversion, which is no longer signed and very muddy.

I am guessing that the newly signed route should be open in a month or so.

The scaffolding at 3 West St Helen Street has finally come down. It first went up in October 2024 when the building was found to be dangerous. There followed a long wait before work could begin to demolish and rebuild the end wall.

That reconstruction is now complete, and while the fencing and the blue site box remain for the moment, they should soon be removed, bringing to an end more than a year of disruption.

Before its closure, the ground floor was used by Pappy’s Afro-Caribbean Cuisine, which had only been open there for nine months. Three residents also lived in the flats above. Around twenty years ago the building housed Glendales, an electrical goods shop. We will now have to wait and see whether Pappy’s returns.

Here is how the building looked three weeks ago, as work on the wall neared completion:

If you were drinking coffee outside Throwing Buns this week, you’d have overheard the theories about the rope-dangling antics above the County Hall Museum. Are they human pigeon scarers, a new art installation, rehearsals for ‘Strictly Come Dangling’ or what?.

More likely, they are inspecting the stone façade up close, checking the carvings and mortar.

One of their tools looks like a moisture meter for detecting damp within the stone and mortar, finding any problems before time and weather can do more harm.