The Cambridge Map Project Episode 1: D4, Newnham

 

The Cambridge Map and Lockdown 3

Lockdown three has brought back almost identical restrictions to the first lockdown in March last year. The message on leaving the house for exercise, similar to before, is to ‘stay local’. ‘Local’ is not clearly defined in statute but in the guidance somewhere it talks about staying within your town, village or the part of the City you live in. Any clarity this might have provided was muddied when Boris Johnson was seen cycling seven miles from Downing Street in the Olympic Park. It was not made clear if he actually cycled there or if he was driven or if it mattered either way. Stratford and Westminster are not usually considered the same part of London, but Boris was deemed not to have broken any rules. Meanwhile, in the same week two women from Ashby-De-La-Zouch were found to have breached the regulations and fined after driving 5 miles from where they lived, to go for a walk at a (possibly) local beauty spot. They had brought coffee which they were told was not allowed because it was classed as a ‘picnic’. I’m not sure if their crime was the driving to the beauty spot, the coffee or because they were judged, League of Gentlemen style, as ‘not local’ to the location.

During the weeks leading up to and through Christmas I had been feeling an increasing sense of lethargy and dis-interestedness, which was magnified by the onset of Lockdown three. In a belated start to the New Year, I decided that I needed a new method to get out and walk within the permitted boundaries of ‘local’.

A rummage in the map draw and I ‘rediscovered’ a 1980 Ordinance Survey map of Cambridge, from the same series as the Ipswich Town Map that I used as the basis for a walk a while ago. The only other map in the series as far as I know is of Southampton, a place definitely not local and I don’t (yet) have the map anyway. The covers of all three maps in the series feature ‘posterised’ images of local landmarks on their front covers.  The Cambridge one has a closeup angular view of Kings College chapel, apparently from the perspective of somebody laying on the grass outside and seeing the building through the prism of 1970s special effects from Beat Club or Top of The Pops.

The scale of the map is ideal for my purposes. Each grid square covers a large enough area to contain sufficient things of interest but one small enough to be do-able easily in an afternoon or morning. All are within reasonable walking or cycling distance from where I live, at least at the weekend when work won’t get in the way. The plan is to select a grid square using random number generators before setting out. A more local but similar idea to the Barnett’s Map project that I started around this time last year but was swiftly halted due to Covid, using the idea of a ‘catapult’ to randomly determine the vicinity of the walk.

Whilst Cambridge is technically a City, I reckon since it is smaller than some towns, let alone any major city, anywhere within its boundary can be considered local to me. The 1980s map will be used as a guide, identifying points of interest that may or may not still exist within the grid square boundary of the walk. New points of interest or possibly disinterest that have appeared since the point in time of the map will certainly be encountered given the level of development and change in the intervening years in parts of the City. The walking, in order to qualify as permitted exercise and not attract attention of the police or others, will have to involve minimal stopping or prolonged loitering at any point of interest. How regular, in both timing and content these walks turn out to be is not predetermined.

Preamble

The random number generator for the first walk selected map square D4. This covers an area bifurcated by Barton Road, with part the suburb of ‘Newnham Croft’ on the South side and part of the University dominated area around Grange Road to the North. The whole area is within the council ward of Newnham, the term also used for the immediate surrounding area in the local vernacular.

The suburb of Newnham Croft is one of the most well-off parts of a well-off but particularly un-equal city. I always think of it as Cambridge’s equivalent of Hampstead or Highgate. As well as being well off, it is also a conservation area. I wasn’t sure if the streets within my map square strictly as part of Newnham Croft, being a bit cut off from the main residential area located in the adjacent square, or if they were simply part of ‘Newnham’. Maybe this would become apparent.

Amble

I began at the corner of Barton Road and Kings Road outside a building that used to be the Hat and Feathers Pub until about 2010. It is not easily recognisable as a former pub, having been completely striped of any external paraphernalia hinting at its former life. I only recall visiting it once, as a teenager, when a friend living around the corner on Selwyn Road had a party. We were ordered to contribute to the swear box several times soon after our arrival. Other than that, I remember very little about the pub. Still, any pub lost to flats, even one with puritanical views on the use of language, is to be mourned and I stood for a few seconds to pay my respects

Across the street, a laminated advert for a mattress sale was attached to a telegraph pole. These are currently prolific throughout Cambridge. They seem to have superseded a previous epidemic of similar notices offering outdoor benches of the type normally found in pub gardens. Maybe these items have become excess due to a downturn in sales of mattresses to hotels and benches to pubs during Covid and there is cheap surplus stock to be had. I imagined a dodgy bloke in a lock-up full of these items, waiting for his mobile to ring after a morning stapling notices to posts around town, a low-level disaster capitalist spawned by Corona Virus.

I turned into Selwyn Road, a street I was only vaguely familiar with from the previously mentioned party and couple of other visits to the same friend’s house around the same time. The street was devoid of people. There seemed to be a clear divide between sides of the road, one made up of modest sized terraced houses but ones which were in keeping with the general ambience found in the main bit if Newnham Croft. The houses on other side of the road by contrast, while not exactly resembling the one depicted in the ‘22 Shit Street’ ceramic ornament Viz used to sell, were much less in keeping with a middle-class conservation area. It more resembled part of a decent post war council estate. A taxi was parked in one drive, and on another house the front door window was boarded up with plywood. The front gardens were lived in, not twee. The contrast between both sides of the street was subtle, but marked and an indicator of a more sensible era when council housing was widespread enough even to appear in posher parts of town.

At the end of the street, I turned into Grantchester Road. This, by no surprise, eventually takes you to the village of Grantchester, famous for the poet Rupert Brooke and less impressively, Jeffrey Archer. Rupert Brooke had a pub named after him in the village and is also associated with the tea orchard which is a big tourist draw. Archer, by contrast, is conspicuous in his absence in any tourist narrative the village uses to attract visitors. I recalled him coming to my secondary school and giving a talk where he extolled the virtue of hard work and competition. The reception he got from the assembled was polite but lukewarm. Any visitors are much more likely to associate the village with Brooke or Robson Green from the ITV drama series ‘Grantchester’ than Archer. Grantchester, the television program, is set in a fictionalised version of the village during the 1950s and partially at least filmed locally. The programme is a formula ITV drama and not of huge interest, other than to spot the difference between real and non-real local references and locations. The village was at least two map squares away from where I was at this point, possibly off the map. It would almost certainly be full of lockdown walkers and joggers, so I was glad I had not been randomly catapulted there today.

I passed the Rugby Stadium, home of the Cambridge Rugby Union Football Club and the University Rugby League club. This was a place I couldn’t ever recall seeing before, although I have cycled this route at least once. That was in the dark after a couple of pints at the Blue Ball in Grantchester, so maybe I didn’t notice it. It is mostly field after all.  The ground is called Volac Park due to a sponsoring deal with Volac, a company based in Royston, Herts and who are ‘world leaders in dairy nutrition’ according to their website. Previously the club was named after Wests Renault Garage a formerly well-established local business across town on Newmarket Road, since gone to make way for the ‘Anglia House’ student flats development.

 

 

On the other side of the road were a couple of University College Sports Grounds. The one belonging to Pembroke College had an impressive brown flat roofed modernist building, presumably the changing rooms and clubhouse. The land being private it was not accessible and I could only view from a distance.

I took a left turned off Grantchester road into ‘The Baulk’ permissive byway, just in time to avoid the point where the narrow, unmarked and in places windy road reached the national speed limit. The Baulk, by contrast, had a far more agreeable 5mph limit, presumably for tractors and people using it to get to the ‘Cocks and Hens’ tennis club for which there was also a sign here. The name seemed fitting for a location in a terrible 1970s ‘sex comedy, starring Robin Askwith rather than the University imbued edgelands of the 21st century city. After I looked at the map, it made more sense. Nearby, at least in 1980, were some Poultry Houses located behind the rugby club. The Baulk, meanwhile, is a historic footpath linking Grantchester and Barton, and also according to the sign, Coton and Maddingley. A path I had previously unaware of until today.

The sign for the Baulk featured the logo for something called’ QTSQ Quarter to Six Quadrant’, which sounded like the name of a mysterious University drinking club. On return google confirmed this referred to the area of Cambridge bordered by a straight line from Maddingley Road South to Grantchester and another from the same point running East to Coton, thus resembling the hands on a clock at a quarter to six. South Cambridgeshire District Council has designated this area a ‘Major Green Infrastructure Target Area’.The name QTSQ has also been adopted by a local association who have their own vision for the area and want to preserve it. They and have managed to get South Cambridgeshire District council to consider this vision as a material planning consideration. Their other activities include an oil club (the domestic fuel type), as well as promoting walks and local pubs in the area. This corner of the Cambridge edge is one hitherto largely untouched by major development unlike most other parts. If any local area is likely to be spared to sort of development seen elsewhere, it’s here. It will be interesting to see how things pan out over the next few years in this area – or ‘Quadrant’.

The path took a 45 degree turn to follow the edge of the ‘Cocks and Hens’ Tennis club, at a  point marked by a second world war pillbox. Not something I had expected to find, but I suppose this was a sort of edgeland, albeit one without the usual connotations of abandoned industry and dilapidation. This was more the edgeland of Cambridge University.

The track within the private grounds of the tennis club was dry and would have been easily walkable. The public track parallel to it, which ran alongside a brook, made me rebuke myself for coming out in footwear only really suitable for urban walking. I’d assumed I wouldn’t encounter the sort of muddy paths I’d inadvertently found myself on the day before across the saturated Stourbridge Common, but would be walking in an area where it was easy to stay on the dry land of asphalt and concrete. I was wrong! The path in front of me was something of a quagmire, but I managed to negotiate it in my unsuitable slip-on DM type boots by sticking to the relatively grassy bit near the brook, managing not to slip and fall in.

Safely on the other side, opposite the beer barrels stacked at the back of the Rugby Stadium, I noticed a gate led to a model railway. This was on the 1980 map, but somewhere I had never known existed and I had wondered if it would have disappeared. This is the home of the Cambridge Model Engineering Society who open the railway for public visits once a month (usually). Through the gate I could see what looked like a level crossing and a few other bits of railway paraphernalia but had I not known it was there, I could easily have missed it due to the prolific number of trees in the site. Further up another gate bore a notice confirming Covid-19 had curtailed public visits, in front of a muddy path that led somewhere but without the notice, again, there was no obvious sign of a model railway, with the place easily resembling a farm with chicken sheds as shown on the 1980 map.

As I approached the end of the section of path, with a small but impressive allotment site on one side and Fulbrooke Road on the other, I realised I hadn’t seen a single person along the Baulk. This place virgin territory for me, which in a city you have lived all your life Is always produces a mixture of mild euphoria and dreamlike unreality, particularly in places that are devoid of other people and out of the way of things. I felt this most keenly at the confluence of the path with Fulbrooke Road, The Allotments and the entrance to Kings College and Selwyn College Sports Ground (private property). Everything seemed to pause momentarily.

This was not just a metaphorical pause, though. I stopped to consult the map and saw two points of interest, things I’d never previously heard of or seen. ‘Stone Bridge’ was shown on the other side of the playing field where what looked like a continuation of the path met Barton Road. Before that, to the left of this path was what appeared to be a large lake, but which was not named or marked otherwise. This was located on land between houses on Fulbrooke Road and Barton Road. I considered going into the sports ground but could see no apparent pathway following the brook as shown on the map. Besides, the notice clearly stated the land was private, so regardless of the gate being wide open, I decided going in was a bad idea, path or no path. I was attempting to stick to the rules and didn’t want any unwanted attention from neighbours or the police.

Instead, I diverted down Fulbrooke Road, where also marking the confluence of paths was an impressive stinkpipe. This contributed to the sort of unchanged and just off the edge of town but not quite village atmosphere of the deserted street, which was very agreeable.

Back on Barton Road I headed towards the location of the Stone Bridge, on the 1980 map. One of the unnecessarily large houses that line the road, and at this point back onto the lake, had a large arched stained-glass window, above which a stone was engraved with ‘2000AD’. Maybe the part of the building above the garage was devoted to some sort of dystopian comic book judgement based religion, that made offerings to whatever dwelt in the lake to appease the deity. 

It soon became apparent there was no access to the lake from any point on Barton Road either and I gave up hope of seeing it. On return, from what I could gather, it is on private land and indeed not accessible to the public. It is known as Bolton’s Pit after George Bolton, who used to quarry bricks there in the 19^th century the quarry later becoming the lake. I did manage to view it via a video on an estate agent’s website, as part of the sales pitch for ‘The Lake House’, a new house on Barton Road with the lake at the end, or possibly in, its back garden. Apologies for the ‘estate agency-ness of the video which I have included purely for illustrative and educational purposes.

https://youtu.be/reJ3bHMZeQ4

Stone Bridge was marked on the map at the point of the sign marking the city limit. It occurred to me that what I thought was a path on the map following the brook through the sports field was in fact the line of the city boundary. I could see just beyond the sign a layby which normally accommodates resting truckers and a burger van, but it was devoid of either. I crossed the road to where a brook emerged. I couldn’t work out if this was the same brook I had been walking along and if this had crossed under the road, or if this was different one. The map was vague on this and looking at the current OS map didn’t help either. There was no sign of a stone bridge either side of the road. But the emerging brook was wider, fuller and flowing much more rapidly here as it turned through a pronounced meander. From the map, I identified this as part of the Bin Brook, a watercourse I had heard of and seen on maps but which had otherwise remained off my radar previously.

A short distance along the brook I reached ‘Gough Way Culvert’ which took the brook underground beneath the Gough Way Estate. Another channel went off at right angles and later investigation revealed this as a relief channel for the Bin Brook. I followed the course of the brook via a passage into Gough Way Estate, which was another part of Cambridge I had no memory of ever visiting  or even being aware of. Most of the houses were built between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s. Houses on the estate suffered flooding in 1978 and again in 2001 and despite the culvert and relief channel there are concerns that the area is still at risk from this happening again. Today, this seemed more than possible.

I brief and uneventful walk among the typical suburban 60s/70s middle class houses soon led to another passage following the direction of the brook. A notice said the footpath was private and would close at 4.30. I can’t recall if there was a gate. Maybe this closure just happened on trust. I decided to take the path since 4.30 was two hours away and despite the sign it didn’t really look private.

I soon emerged at a small recreation ground surrounded by houses on three sides. On the left side the Bin Brook had re-emerged and the footpath followed its course. A handful of young people were on the rec and I soon passed a trio of elderly(ish) women with small dogs, who said hello and didn’t appear to regard me as suspicious. That, in my mind, validated my right to walk the path. The path and brook separated the estate on one side and Corpus Christi College Sports Ground on the other, the latter hidden behind trees but clear on the 1980 map.

I noticed the path featured lights in the floor which are sometimes found on cycle paths. The path seemed a bit narrow to accommodate cycling, but a sign advising people to slow down in advance of a sharp blind bend suggested the route was used to cycle into town. As I took the bend, I saw no cyclists. My attention was momentarily diverted into the field which suddenly appeared on the estate side of the path as the houses ran out. It looked at first glance like a normal agricultural field but there were two people standing in the middle having a chat among whatever was growing. They didn’t strike me as farmers and I wondered if the field was connected with the West Cambridge site nearby which is an amalgam of University linked science based institutions. Was the field was used for conventional agriculture or some sort of experimentation? Given the strangeness of the last year and the weird times we are living in, the second option felt like something that now would probably be regarded as more normal and run of the mill than perhaps it ought to be . Of course, they could have quietly been plotting to sell the land for housing, although being in the Quarter to Six Quadrant this would have been a bit optimistic on their part.

I only encountered one other person along the remaining section of the path. A jogger, who showed no sign of intending to deviate from a straight trajectory in the middle of the narrow path, presented an awkward social distancing challenge. I had to force myself into a hedge in order to try and move myself two metres away. While mildly irritating, the narrow path was never going to allow much leeway when meeting anybody coming the other way. I reflected that while not an ideal place to go for a run, anybody living 'local' who did not have access to the vast green spaces of the various University sports fields in the vicinity, had little choice but to make do with the limited space available in between them.

I emerged into Cranmere Road which I realised was out of the map square. But there had been no other route given that much of the land this side of Barton Road in square D4 was inaccessible University or College land. This road led to Grange Road where I headed back into D4. Grange Road was at the Eastern edge of the map square. Along it I passed a mixture of college and University buildings, mostly residential. Nothing immediately struck me and the lack of sideroads to explore and the beginning of aching legs indicated it was time to depart square D4. I decided to turn back and exit the grid square to the North where just beyond was the Cambridge University Rugby Union Club. I briefly stood outside to look at and pay homage to the Red Lion statue, which was unceremoniously half hidden behind a skip. After bidding farewell to the former Town Centre icon I walked home.

 

Romsey Ward Boundary: A walk for Terminalia

To mark the feast of Terminalia, Roman God of Boundaries, I decided to walk around, within and to various points on the boundary of the Ward of Romsey. Residing in the ward, it seemed sensible to do something close to home. This was for two reasons. Firstly, it would be good way of seeing things always in close proximity in a  different way. Psychogeography begins at home, or at least ought to more often, I thought. Secondly, I was too disorganised, busy with mundane things like work and in most cases too far away to get to any of the events people had organised for the Terminalia Festival of Psychogeography. I had left it too late to organise something involving other people. So this was a solitary Sunday morning excursion but one done in tandem with, or at least on the same day as, many others walking borders and boundaries.

Romsey Town, which is the epicentre of the Ward, is a place I have long associations with. My mum's family came from the area, helping to construct the Labour Club which I was taken to as a kid for Sunday Lunchtime Bingo. Later I used to pass through the area at night on my way home from gigs and  pubs in town as a teenager. About 12 years ago I gravitated to the area to live and am still here. Despite the more recent years of increasing gentrification that have happened despite my presence, the place still projects an atmosphere of 'Romseyness'. This is hard to describe but is something resulting from an amalgam of  the particular Victorian street patterns dating from the Railway Age and Little Russia and the buildings contained within. The houses themselves, the other buildings that interperse them including the Labour Club (now closed dilapidated but still standing), the ABC Barbecue Chip Shop, The Co-op and places like the flat roofed Bed Centre on the corner of Ross Street where a rare giant advertising  billboard stands, give off the same constant underlying atmosphere.  In addition, a number of familiar characters have always inhabited the area.  Some have been around for years, some are more recent. The sad departure of 'Nice Weather Lady' whose funeral was the other week marks the loss of Romsey's version of Disco Kenny. But others are still  here. Romsey Ward encompasses a wider area and I wasn't sure the atmosphere was really the same in the more peripheral zones along the boundary. Indeed, until I decided to do this walk, I'd been pretty much unaware of where the boundary was.

Terminalia takes place on the 23rd February, the last day of the Roman year so marking a temporal boundary, but concerned with boundaries and borders of all types. Terminus is said to protect all within his bounds and help focus on priorities and release problems over which you have no control.

I considered that ward boundaries were things that most people were not that interested in and had little control over anyway, other than to respond to obscure local authority consultations about any propsed changes. So as well as convienient, the Romsey Ward Boundary seemed appropriate. Unlike most people, who have already let go of  any thoughts of understanding or caring about the vagueries of local authority boundaries or more likely probably never bothered to pick them up in the first place, I had got stuck in a loop of fruitless internet searching. This brought nothing but frustration at the lack of comparitive temporal ward maps to be found.  I had vague recollections of talk of ward boundary changes to Romsey a few years back, so had doubts about the accuracy of the Council website version of the map which, although sanctioned by Ordnance Survey, was dated 2012. In the end it appeared that, as far as I could work out, the changes made were County Council ones to electoral districts, which are not to be confused with City Council wards. I let go of any thoughts of confirming this beyond all doubt and settled for the 2012 map.

I started on a footpath that bisects an enclosed patch of green space off Rustat Road. Corrie Road Guides Hut sits fenced off at the end of this enclosure and straddles the ward boundary, this path takes a right turn more or less at the border with the next ward, Coleridge. The hut sits directly on the boundary and the lamp post more or less marks the boundary line in front of it. The green space, too small to be featured on google maps and, as far as I know, nameless, had been spruced up a bit. Grafitti was almost absent and strangely two Chrstmas trees had been planted along with more traditional daffodils.

I headed out of the green space onto Rustat Road and to the cycle bridge that crosses the railway line, the first border point I visited on the Romsey/Petersfield boundary.  The railway line splits the two Wards and also the two sides of Mill Road. The difference between sides of the road is much less marked since the days of Red Romsey. With both sides of the bridge now almost equally gentrified, the old social boundary has been removed to the archive of folk memory.

The view from the cycle bridge down the track to Mill Road Bridge, the next border point on my route, was as ever obscured by the moss and black mold that forms around about eye level on the perspex covering.

I doubled back to reach Mill Road Bridge via Argyle Street, past the Housing Co-op that backs onto the Railway Line, a place as near to the boundary as it's possible to live. The familiar mural on the bridge was accompanied by several laminated notices from the 'Stop the Train Wash' campaign. The giant train wash was, apparently, one of the main reasons for the works on the bridge back in the summer.  I don't recall any mention of it anywhere during the 'Mill Road Summer' of the bridge closure. The campaign literature features a photoshopped impression of what the facility will look like. The image shows a giant nine meter tall dark grey monolith, stretching along and looming over the gardens of the houses on Great Eastern Street that back onto the railway. It brought to mind The Black Tower'. I could see how it might bring about similar levels of mental decline in the residents of Great Eastern Street to that experienced by the protagonist in the 1980s Channel 4 TV short. The structure will, if it happens, be sited in the railway owned no-mans land on the border between wards and operational mostly overnight, giving it a 24 hour presence even when it's too dark to see.

On top of the Bridge is a memorial bench commemorating Suzy Oakes, 'Champion of Mill Road'. This sits in the middle of the Bridge on the border between the two Wards, symbolic of the bringing together both sides of Mill Road across the divide through events like Mill Road Winter Fair.

I headed down the steps into the car park at the end of Great Eastern Street. Near the bottom a new pathway presumably marks the forthcoming 'Chisholm Trail' cyclepath, which will follow the boundary along the railway until crossing into Abbey in Coldhams Common and onwards to Chesterton and Cambridge North, where it will pick up the Busway path beyond to cross countless other borders and boundaries as far as St Ives (Cambs).

At the end of Great Eastern Street, a no through road, a wall marks the boundary with the railway land behind. A majestic old stink pipe rises up it front of it.

I doubled back and took the parallel Cavendish Road. At the end I went as far as I could to the left where a road/track joins the railway land, until the point where I became an unauthorized person.

Looming up beyond the gate was an object resembling a watchtower, reminicent of something from the Berlin Wall. I probably had spent too long looking at a book called 'Cold War East Anglia' in Waterstones the day before.

Along Cromwell Road, backing onto the railway, is Winstanley Court, a recent(ish) development of flats. Presumably and oddly named after Gerald Winstanley, who lead the Diggers in opposing the enforced boundaries brought by the enclosures. While laudable, the more local Jake of The Style, who is said to have lead an uprising that prevented nearby Coldhams Common being enclosed, is not remembered in any of the new development along this stretch. I attempted to walk through, thinking I could emerge somewhere back on Cromwell Road nearer to Coldhams Lane. But it appeared there were three separate developments, cut off from each other by walls and fences. The individual estates had been enclosed, each a labyrinth of dead ends. It appeared each was owned by a different developer, all three keen to prevent wandering between their plots.

I ascended Coldhams Lane Bridge, the third point along the rail border. The tower of a chinmey or extraction shute of some kind rose up from an old brown buidling used by the railway. I recalled British Telecom having an operation here when I was small. This was during the days of Buzby, an orange cartoon bird who encouraged people to 'make someone happy with a cheap rate phone call'. The campaign was a big success at the time, there was even a Buzby Fan Club for kids. The orange bird must, therefore, take a significant amount of blame for the current prediciment of mobile phone induced always-on-ness that we find ourselves in today.

I had wafted back from late 1970s TV ad nostalgia by the time I reached the pinnacle of the Bridge from where I observed the railwway border once more. This was the only point I strayed across the border from Romsey. I followed the Bridge down along the other side on the boundary between Petersfield and Abbey, and crossed the other side into Abbey briefly before going back up and into Romsey again. It's not possible to cross at the apex and I didn't want to retreace my steps.

On the way down I noticed a poster for a past event at the Centre for Computing History. The strange blue androi- like womans face was slightly unearving. I had heard a story on the radio earlier about a human like robot being produced in Japan that could wince at 'pain', the most lifelike yet. This was a far cry from the days of the ZX81 and of Clive Sinclair and his ilk, members of which I assumed the monochrome faces on the poster belonged to. According to the radio story, the boundaries between artificial and real intellegence, human and robot, were becoming ever increasingly blurred.

At the bottom of the bridge I turned into Coldhams Road, the main artery of the light industrial estate starting underneath the arches. This was a somewhere too old school to be considered a business park, with a place that looked like a mini-scrapyard next to a tile outlet and several MOT garages. Coldhams Road hugged the railway line on one side and a series of mostly single story flat roofed premises behind spikey metal fences on the other. I had expected little sign of life and noted the absence of the bacon roll van normally seen during the week. But I was not alone. Several cars passed me and further on I saw people getting out to enter a brown flat roofed premise that would not have looked out of place in 1970s Dr Who. It turned out the building is now used by a church of some kind.

Just beyond was a bizarre and incredible old house (well, maybe 1930s) called Orchard Cottage. I had never seen it before, this being virgin territory for me. Net and bedroom curtains were up, making it look inhabited. It's the only house on this stretch of the boundary, and possibly the most unusual feature I'd seen so far. It wouldn't have looked so weird surrounded by an Orchard next to Coldhams Common, which given it's name I suspected it was in an earlier period.

Just past this another building was being used as church, I couldnt see anyone but could hear a pastor sermonising in a manner more suited to the Southern United States than a deserted light industrial estate on the Romsey boundary.

A spikey locked blue gate festooned on each side with notices signified I'd come as far as I was permitted along Coldhams Road. Just beyond this somewhere is Hilary's wholesalers, the same firm who have a green grocer in the Romsey end of Mill Road. The wholesale operation is located in Abbey. I took the gate to be roughly at the boundary of Romsey's extention along this unusual track.

I retraced my steps, pausing briefly at the locked gate that separated the industrial estate from the railway land beneath the bridge.

On Coldhams Common I made my way to the 'Bridge of Moad', which carries the railway over the short graffitied tunnel that passes beneath. Another  boundary point between Romsey and Abbey.

I entered the tunnel and observed, among the most recent street art offerings, a green faced apparition that at first struck me as something that belonged on the cover of an album by The Meteors. A bit further away it looked like a hand held device clutching, aggressive and anthropomorphized mobile phone decorated with pound and dollar signs. A Buzby for a new generation.

I followed the line of the railway along the common until the next border point. I've written about the Black Bridge (no longer black) before.   I climbed up to view the railway line and observed recent grafitti referring to someone or something called 'Futhead'. More impressive was the lichen at the top of the bridge which grew in the shapes of small countries and continents, sparking visions of self contained micro-worlds where, although unobservable, things were happening.

I lurked under the bridge for a while, looking through the boundary 'window' where the airs of Romsey and Abbey mixed and counteracted each other in the neutral space between each side.

I followed the common, as far as possible  staying adjacent to the railway. Eventually the way was blocked by a fence and small thicket of sparsely fly-tipped bushes and trees. Somewhere behind these are Stourbridge Grove allotments which hug the railway line for a while. I followed the semi-circle of grass back along the line of back gardens belonging to houses on Coldhams Lane, then back onto Coldhams Lane itself  to head to the next boundary point.

This short part of the journey was relatively uneventful, other than an encounter with a distressed antique looking telephony box in someone's front garden that bore similarly vintage 'Nigel' tag.

At the roundabout, I passed the brown single storey buildings of what used to be the Adult Education Centre, a small complex that radiated 1960s municipality and Dr Who vibes. On the other side of the road it was impossble not to notice the much more recent and oversized C3 Church building. This manifestation of the Australian franchise megachurch projected something that felt more akin to 'V' than Dr Who and more akin to big business than municipality.

I followed the fence around the brown building just onto the end of Barnwell Road. Just before I reached the next boundary point I noticed what appeared to be the ghost site of an old electricity facility.  No equipment or danger of death signs but the concrete base along with a telecoms box were still there, enclosed by a square fence topped with barbed wire.

The railway bridge nearby marked the border, crossed beneath by the road that heads out to East Barnwell.

I followed Coldhams Lane under another railway bridge, this time just within the boundary. The other side, a left turn brought me into Nuttings Road./Upware Road. This residential corner is cut off on all sides and sits almost forgotten. But it is contained in the Romsey boundary, which diverges from the railway in order to take in these streets before aligning with it again. This small area of post war housing, which surrounds a municipal green area, has the peripheral feel of a border outpost settlement.

I headed around the green and through a passage on Upware Road that lead into the East Barnwell Nature Reserve, via a gate allowed me to cross the boundary where it stretches behind the houses. I walked the pathway behind the gardens and saw that the last house had an outbuilding of some kind at the end of the Garden, just within the Romsey Boundary. I couldn't tell what the square concrete looking structure was used for. It may have been a laundry room or maybe Romseys most far flung Air BnB. Whatever, the structure resembled an outpost bunker, suited to being on the border.

Emerging out of Nuttings Road, I crossed back under the Bridge and over the road. I paused outside the entrance to the Army Reserves complex next to Sainsbury's, built on the old Saxon cement works site. This facility prevented me following the boundary along the railway line. Unsurprisingly it was securely gated and there was no through path for the public  The low level paranoia emanating from the site brought Cold War East Anglia back to the fore momentarily.

I travelled parallel to the site along the brook behind Sainsbury's. A footpath follows it behind some back gardens until it emerges in Brookfields.

I turned into The Tins, one of the Pathways to Cherry Hinton from Brookfields and Burnside. This part of the Tins runs just inside the boundary with Coleridge Ward. On the Romsey side is the Army Reserves/Saxon Works site. Beyond the trees, as indicated by the 'Danger Deep Water' sign, is a lake created from an old pit. On the Coleridge side there are two more lakes, this time created out of pits of The Norman Works. These were fairly recently the subject of a campaign to open up 'The Romsey Lakes' and create a 'Romsey Beach', which seems a bit cheeky on Romsey's part. They have also been called 'the Cherry Hinton Lakes'. But never 'the Coleridge Lakes'.

I reached the footbridge taking the path across the railway border. The bridge marks a three way confluence of boundaries of Romsey, Coleridge and Cherry Hinton. At this extremity of it's border, there was little tangible feeling of Coleridge present within the cast iron structure. It crosses exclusively between the realms of Romsey and Cherry Hinton like a miniature edgelandic bi-frost.

I headed back to Brookfields. According to the Council Map the boundary put Burnside, which runs to the left when emerging from The Tins, as just inside Coleridge, the boundary running through the houses and placing the road firmly on the other side of Romsey. I suspect this was inaccurate and the boundary line had been overlain slightly off kilter with the street map. Otherwise, the residents would be Romsey/Coleridge hybrids for voting purposes. Truly people of the border!

This meant I had to double back and head along Perne Road to get to Budleigh Close. At the end is another boundary point with Coleridge where the close converges with Burnside, The Snakey Path, the Allotments and one of the 'Romsey Lakes'.

Back along Budleigh Close I saw a faded blank noticeboard attached to somebodys garden fence. Mosses and lichens had colonised it, taking advantage of prolonged inactivity by human hands. The houses behind date from the 1980s but the notice board seemed to belong to a previous age of 1950s council housing that made up a large swathe of Coleridge. My grandparents lived in such a house, not very far from this spot. The board acted as a portal, triggering flashbacks to the Coleridgian atmosphere I associated with the area of post war housing stretching from Cherry Hinton Hall through to the area around Coleridge Rec. My mind had briefly passed through the ward boundary, temporally as well as spacially. I was momentarily back in a vague time of side passages, garages, recs, and white dog poo ridden grass verges near where ice cream vans parked and where it was permenently Saturday or Sunday.

Further, a Banksy-esque piece of street art that proclaimed 'life is beautiful'  decorated a wall. Cars had parked in a rare display of consideration to leave a gap enabling passers by to observe it. The mysterious 'M' had claimed responsibility, his or her mark placed within the floating heart/balloon.

The passage next to the scout hut across Perne Road was more or less on the boundary border but was a dead end.

Instead, I diverted until I was back on the boundary running along the back fence of Coleridge School field. The fence gave a solid feel of division between the two wards.

The fence ran out as I emerged into Mamora Road but there was a clear difference in feel between  each side of the road. A distinct 'Romseyness' on one side and a 'Coleridgeness' on the other. The map showed all of Mamora Road as being in Romsey. But it felt like the boundary existed right along the middle of the street.

I crossed into Coleridge briefly for the final stretch, to Corrie Road and back through the passage that met the boundary at the Guides Hut. The nameless green space was both ward boundary confluence and terminal point, a fitting realm for Termimus. I lingered a while and considered the variation in atmosphere in Romsey. The outer edges of the ward were different, yet often similar, with the feel of neighbouring wards often seeping and mixing in to create hybrid zones at the borders. The Coldhams Road industrial estate stood out as somewhere with its own microclimate, the only place that seemed totalky separate. Nuttings Road too seemed to have a certain independence, and was somewhere that could easily defect to Abbey with which it shared a more similar atmosphere. These thoughts drifted away and I departed the realm of Terminus, leaving behind no offering of wine or suckling pig (the Co-op wasn't open yet), just the walk itself, which felt more than sufficient.