I used to live in Rectory Road and now I live in Belstead Avenue. When I was moving I had to make the journey between the two roads a lot and I was always amazed at how hard it was to get across the road at Luther Road and Station Street.

Now I’m an able bodied man in my thirties and can look after myself. However with both Hillside Primary School and Stoke High School, let alone the Sure Start centre either in Belstead Avenue or Maidenhall Approach there are a lot of children who are from the area around Rectory Road who are expected to cross this road every day. Many of these children are very young.

If we want to encourage walking and cut down on the potential for accidents then we need to get a crossing at the part of the road where Luther Road and Station Street meet.

I was at the Maidenhall Residents Association yesterday and they have been a victim of typical bureaucratic heavy handed over-reaction.  Essentially due to out of area drug users sheltering in the flats in Station Street they’ve cut the trade access to all the flats across the ward.

This makes sense near the town, for example Station Street and Vernon Street, but the Maidenhall Estate is not in the same position.  It’s a decent walk from the town and there have been few complaints of drug users sheltering down there.  This means that there’s no post, no milkman, no visitors.  If you are out in Station Street you have around twenty neighbours to buzz you in, in Maidenhall Approach you only have three.

The solution – to petition separately for each group of flats – is not practical.  So Station Street has a genuine problem and the housing department did the right thing there.  But Maidenhall Estate was happy with the current set up.  Can’t they just get it back?

This sort of one size fits all knee jerk solution is what Labour specialises in.  A Conservative led administration should do better than this,

The electricity cut that caught those of us in Rectory Road (as well as Wherstead Road, Station Street and who knows where else) did not come on in our house until 1.30 pm because they had somehow managed to trip our power switch and we had to call out an electrician.  Luckily we did not open the fridge or freezer or we could have been throwing away almost a weeks worth of food. 

These cuts have been very frequent in the last six months, even if not as long lasting. 

Another Photograph of Bridge, this one is particularly dear to me as it is around the corner from where I live.

Simon Knott (who does the excellent Suffolk Churches website) has also transcribed the plaques.

There is one correction, later on Simon says that he thinks that the pentecostalist church next door used to be St. Peter’s parish rooms, but I was told by Father Leeder at St. Pancras that this was actually an outstation of St. Pancras’s when St Pancras covered most of Bridge Ward.  It may have been both at different times.