King's Ely from the air

A new aerial film of the school campus... looking good...

Healthy High Streets

This Guardian article explores the changes in the High St, including the increasing numbers of vape shops. These have been joined by a prevalence of bookmakers (betting shops - some students think you mean places that make books) and pawnbrokers (that one might needs some explaining too...)

From the article:

The study, conducted by researchers at Health Equity North, looked at Ordnance Survey data to track how amenities had changed between 2014 and 2024. The amenities were divided into those seen as “health promoting”, such as pharmacies, libraries and supermarkets, and “health reducing” such as vape shops, bookmakers, takeaways and alcohol-only outlets.

They found a stark decline in healthier amenities, with unhealthy alternatives taking their place. Takeaway shops were up by almost a quarter (24%) across England, while the number of banks and building societies decreased by 40%, and supermarkets by 10%.

The report found there were stark regional divides across England regarding high-street amenities, with twice as many vape shops in the north of England. The number of takeaways in the north of England rose by a third (31%), compared with a rise of 18% in the south.

There were three times as many vape shops in deprived areas compared with the least deprived ones. Deprived areas also had 25 times more pawnbrokers and more than three times as many bookmakers.

Dr Eman Zied Abozied, research associate at Newcastle University Population Sciences Institute, said the study showed that high streets were becoming “less healthy and welcoming places to visit”.

We will be refreshing our Year 7 fieldwork for the new academic year.

We will be making use of Chloë Searl's fieldwork sheets.

Far from a plane old tree....

More than £100 000 has been awarded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund to help safeguard the future of one of the UK's oldest and most important heritage trees - The Great London Plane of Ely! 

Image: Alan Parkinson, shared on Flickr under CC license

I am lucky to be able to walk through the Old Palace gardens whenever I want, and standing in the garden is a huge London plane tree.

Via the King's Ely social media feed.

Believed to be the first ever National Lottery grant allocated to an individual historic tree, the £121 000 will allow innovative bracing and pruning work to be carried out on the tree by Italian and UK experts, using ground-breaking techniques for the first time in this country.
The Great London Plane of Ely is situated in the gardens of the Old Palace, which is home to our Sixth Form Centre. 

The tree was planted in around 1674, and is believed to have been a gift from King Charles II to the Bishop of Ely.

David Day, Chair of Governors at King's, is leading the campaign to support the tree. 

He said: 

“We are thrilled that The National Lottery Heritage Fund has awarded a grant to fund the conservation of this heritage tree of national importance. The money will help to ensure that this magnificent tree can be enjoyed by future - as well as current - generations. It stands as a fine example of how our natural heritage can be conserved and nurtured. The funding allows innovative techniques to be implemented for the first time in the UK, providing a blueprint for the conservation of many other important trees. This grant would not be possible without the National Lottery players, and we thank them for their generous support.”

The Great London Plane of Ely was recognised as one of the Top 50 Great British Trees by The Tree Council in 2002 – the only plane tree on the list. It is commemorated with a plaque on site.

The Tree Council CEO, Sara Lom, said: 

“As identified in 2002, the selected heritage trees were of exceptional beauty, rarity or national interest, some as old as medieval cathedrals and a few older than Stonehenge. All our great British Heritage Trees are equally worthy of protection as are our stately homes and castles.”

With funding now in hand, a team of UK and Italian arboricultural experts guided by Dr Stefania Gasperini, former President of the European Arboricultural Council, will employ an approach called morphophysiology to conserve the tree. This technique takes account of how the tree has developed throughout its life, managing it as naturally as possible to support its future long-term growth. While employed extensively in Europe, this project will be the first time this approach has been used to conserve a heritage tree in the UK.

While the Great London Plane of Ely continues to enjoy vigorous good health and displays plenty of new season extension growth, old cable bracing installed in the 1940s and 1980s now needs to be replaced. The new bracing will be installed within the tree canopy, and over a 4-year period, precision pruning will encourage growth in the areas where the tree needs additional strength, sustaining its vitality long into the future.

The team behind the Ely conservation efforts, including Will Temple, Grounds and Gardens Manager at King's, are working with The Tree Council, The Woodland Trust, Arboricultural Association, and the University of Cambridge's Department of Engineering.

The conservation work is set to start in July, and real-time data monitoring will be gathered in order to assess the new bracing and pruning regime across the seasons, with the information collected made available to help inform conservation efforts for other heritage trees.

The Great London Plane of Ely (Platanus x hispanica) is a hybrid of the Oriental plane and American sycamore, and is believed to be one of the UK’s original London Planes. It is also the largest London Plane in the UK at around 42m high.

Plans are in place to ensure community engagement and public access to the tree through organised garden open days, artist events, tours, and participation in Heritage Open Days.

A camera will also be installed to allow the public to access live footage of the tree at any time, through The Tree Council website.

Ribe - twinned with Ely

Have you heard of Ribe?

Ribe is twinned with Ely. 

It is a town in Denmark - the oldest town in the country apparently, on the western side of the Jutland peninsula.

Ely has been twinned with Ribe since the 1950s.

Ely and Ribe both have a wealth of historic buildings, an iconic cathedral at their heart, and share a similar agricultural backdrop and a flat, open-skyed, and watery landscape.

There is a tapestry at the Riverside Maltings space in Ely.

According to Ely Museum:

One of Ribe's most famous citizens was Emil Christian Hansen who is known as 'the father of Modern Brewing' and he worked at the Carlsberg Laboratories in Copenhagen. In 1883 he was the first to discover that the yeast needed in brewing was composed of different kinds of fungi and that it could be cultivated, this discovery is still valuable today used in the vast majority of beer production worldwide!

Image link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/morton1905/9555721557/sizes/l/

Shared under CC license on Flickr by morton1905

Old images of Ely

Looking at how Ely has changed is part of our work on the local area.

This is a useful website for this activity.

Living Streets and Pavement Clutter

A useful possible NEA topic would be to explore the impact of pavement clutter in urban areas, particularly perhaps in High Street or city centre areas. This could also be a useful focus for young people to explore, and I may add this to my usual exploration of the High Street with Year 7 early in the new academic year.

The charity Living Streets has started the Cut the Clutter campaign to try to reduce the amount of pavement clutter - quite apart from all the existing street furniture. 

Badly parked cars are the main culprits of course, although they tend to be restricted in city centres due to other restrictions. That doesn't stop rental e-bikes and scooters from being dumped on pavements. The growth in ownership of electric vehicles has also led to charging cables being run across pavements, or chargers taking up space. Advertising signage, particularly those with display screens are another menace, as well as guzzling energy and therefore having a large carbon footprint.

There are a number of things which encroach on pavement space, which can be an issue for all pedestrians, but particularly those with mobility or vision impairment.

Living Streets has shared resources on this before, and an email to mailing list subscribers earlier this week reminded me of this topic. It would make a useful topic for some fieldwork, so I am going to work up something for my Year 7 groups for the first couple of weeks of the new term - I've started to put together the resources.

Living Streets is calling for local authorities to prioritise clearing footways and pavements through measures including (but not limited to):

• banning all A-board advertising on the pavement
• putting in place plans and budget to remove excess or unused street furniture (eg signs and poles, guard rail and utility boxes or phone boxes)
• providing guidance to businesses using pavement space for outdoor entertainment that they must maintain a 1.5m pavement width
• ensuring maintenance of trees and hedges that encroach on pavements
• making a commitment that EV charging points and cycle storage will only be placed on pavements where 1.5m clearance width for pedestrians can be maintained
• Ensuring that rental e-scooter parking is placed on the carriageway, and not on pavements – there is no need to sacrifice pedestrian space in order to support micromobility.

The clutter produces issues for Guide Dog owners and others who are visually impaired.

Outdoor dining has proliferated since the pandemic and some of this occupies pavement space as well.

Download a free copy of the WalkBook from here (PDF download)

This provides an impetus to walk in urban (and rural) areas rather than rely on other forms of transport.

How has the High Street changed in recent years?

 

This article and interactive from the BBC News website is particularly useful in helping to answer that question and is particularly relevant for our work with Year 7.

Enter a postcode to see which changes have occurred in your local area.

There is also a useful summary showing the changing fortunes of certain shops and services.

The data has been collected by the Ordnance Survey.

Ely High Street mirrors some of these changes to some extent.

Temporary placemaking

It has been interesting to see the adaptations to parts of Ely, which are preparing for being used as a location for filming for a new film called 'Maestro', on the life of Leonard Bernstein. An example of temporary place making for geographers...

Image: Sally Parkinson

GI Pedagogy - come and hear about it

Come along to an ERASMUS+ event at my school: King's Ely, funded by the British Council.

This is a multiplier event for the GI Pedagogy project.

The GI Pedagogy project has involved exploring the pedagogy that might be applied when using GIS to support teaching, using Rosenshines Principles and a stepped model that we have developed, along with a literature review.

We have put together an online course which we'd also like to introduce you to during the afternoon session.

We'll give you a light lunch and refreshments.

Tickets to come along to Ely are free.

They can be booked on this Eventbrite link - there is space for 25 people in total in person.

If you can't make it in person, but would like to join online, let me know and we'll see what can be organised for you. Eventbrite doesn't seem to want me to add a hybrid event.

Departing Department Stores

This is a timely and important document for many of our cities.

Our department stores have faced unprecdented challenges in the last few years. 

We explore the changing High Street with Year 7.

We have lost some familiar names that have been around for decades, and this has also led to large and beautiful buildings sitting empty and under threat as they are unlikely to find new tenants in a hurry due to their size and central locations. The report includes stores from national chains such as Debenhams to more local and regional examples. In Norwich, for example, we have the Jarrold's stores which are an important part of the town centre's retail  offering. 

Many of these buildings could be described as 'cathedrals of commerce' with important architectural value.

Produced by Save Britain's Heritage.

Thanks to this tweet for the tipoff to the report, which is free to download.

Report issued by @SAVEBrit focuses on the crisis facing Britain’s handsome and varied department stores, urging imaginative reuse of our ‘cathedrals of commerce'. Full report here: https://t.co/u6oTeULz5c pic.twitter.com/2bvHg18Dom

— Philip Downer (@frontofstore) April 5, 2022

Follow the group on Twitter.

AQA Pre-release 2022

I was told yesterday that the AQA GCSE pre-release material for the 2022 summer exam season was based in / or mentioned Ely, so I asked for a copy and discovered that it was based on an application by Amey to add an incinerator to their existing waste management park near Waterbeach / Denny Abbey to the south of Ely, along the A10.

The scheme was controversial, although the benefits were clearly stated by the company. A protest group was set up, and commissioned a report on the impact of the proposal, which included mention of the chimney which would be taller than Ely Cathedral and spoil the view towards it from Madingley (a place of geographical significance).

Interestingly, for a pre-release where students usually have to weigh up whether a planned development should go ahead, the decision has already been made in that the scheme was .... spoiler alert.... turned down in 2020.

I tried to add some local contexts - newspaper articles, campaign group reports, local landscape character analysis reports etc. into the mix and shared to the community - AQA is the most popular GCSE specification choice so there will be lots of teachers looking to prepare something on this, and we are all working at our limits at the moment with hybrid learning for many still due to students recovering at home from COVID.

Anthony Bennett has added a copy of the document to his page of pre-release materials. This is available to subscribers and non-subscribers of Internet Geography.

An editable version is below or on this link...

Feel free to download a copy and add your own ideas to the document - there have already been some deletions from the document which is a little disappointing, but I have been able to recover to previous versions.

Images: Alan Parkinson and shared under CC license

A new Fenland blog

I belong to a few Fenland Facebook groups.

A new Fenland blog written by Richard Poynder was mentioned.

You can read it on the link here.

Boat Race 2021

The annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race has been moved out of London this year to avoid the crowds and a damaged bridge.

This has happened before.

This is my image of the finish line when the boat race was last held in Ely. It also appears on the Fascinating Fens calendar for 2021.

We've seen all the signs going up to close off the foothapths and roads in the area around, from the edge of Ely through Queen Adelaide to Littleport: a long stretch of road I drive along on my commute. Our students also row on that stretch normally, and the school has a part to play in the event as well. We have previously welcomed the Cambridge women's crew into our assembly at King's too.

I've seen the Cambridge crew training early doors.

Cambridge training on the River Great Ouse at Littleport this afternoon for @TheBoatRace 2021.
#TheBoatRace #BritishRowing #Littleport #RiverGreatOuse pic.twitter.com/VTdT0UdRCK

— Fenland on Film (@FenlandOnFilm) March 23, 2021

We shall be watching with interest...

Air Quality Fieldwork

Data collected on the 4th of December.

Air Quality

Year 9 are on to the Air Quality fieldwork investigation task.

This involves them in collecting data using a hand held device similar to the ones here. They were purchased on eBay, and seem to be reasonably accurate.

There are also several sources of secondary data as well as the primary data we are collecting, using Survey123 and ArcGIS Online.

Ely Standard

Ely Standard has a special feature on the High Street this week and the way that independent shops are thriving.

There are interviews with the owners of some of the shops that we investigated last week.

Always on the look out...

..for drone filming in and around Ely to see the city in a different way.
This is excellent

Ely - 1943

An excellent British Pathe film from 1943
Some familiar locations which look just the same now in and around the school.
We will be exploring ideas of place and changing place in the new academic year when we are able to get back into the classroom.

Ely

Ely featured on this Open Country broadcast recently. Thanks to Helen Young for the tipoff.



Earlier this year, Helen Mark visited the Isle of Eels in the heart of the Cambridgeshire Fens for its annual eel day festival. She joins the parade of eels through the streets and takes part in the World Eel Throwing Competition (which thankfully involves no real eels). She also learns about the life cycle of the eel and discovers how this extraordinary fish is intimately bound up with the history and culture of Ely. 

Cathedral walk

A distinctive element of Ely's built landscape is the cathedral, the 'Ship of the Fens'. Here's an image from our weekly walk to the cathedral which has been edited with the PRISMA app.
Can you reimagine a familiar place?

Image: Alan Parkinson, shared under CC license