Your History Here

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"Hello, and welcome to YourHistoryHere, the place where you can share your knowledge about those unusual places, buildings or things that make places interesting to live. This site is on limited circulation at the moment, and is only supposed to be a mySociety demo, not a big posh project like PledgeBank. It may not be obvious, but the most important feature of YourHistoryHere is the construction of an underlying system for collecting and sharing geographic annotations in an open syndicated format, so you can use the yummy local data people leave for your own purposes. We're building two sites that show how this can be useful, this one and Placeopedia.com, and we'd love to share the code for other ideas. Anyone want to build WhereIHadMyFirstKiss.com? Tom Steinberg, mySociety Director - 23/08/2005"

About This Place...

Site of the (now defunct) Cow and Calf pub

This was a great pub, though in decline by the time I started going there. It had a fine collection of cats (some owned by the publican, some merely visitors) and a decent range of real ales (sadly much diminished in the few months before it closed). In fairness, the soft drinks were the cheapest money could buy, the bar snacks little better, and the service glacial (the publican was often to be seen drinking in the County, even when his own pub was open, but I don't know whether this was because he tired of waiting for his pint to be poured...). Another idiosyncracy was the pool table which was located directly under a leak in the roof; and if I remember correctly, the loos were nothing to write home about either. Anyway, it had character, but now it's gone forever, more's the pity.

Long. 0.11211, Lat. 52.21185 | written on 12th Sep 2005 by Chris Lightfoot | Email this to a friend | abusive?

Responses

Chris Lightfoot replies: God, this makes me seem like a real whinging old codger, doesn't it?

written 13th Sep 2005 | abusive?

Valerie Zink replies: I knew this pub during the fifties when my father, George Keating was the landlord. I lived there for several years. At that time, the address was 14 Pound Hill. I can still remember the telephone number...55883.....but I cannot remember the last telephone number I had before my current one. My brother, Derrick learned how to play snooker in that pub and went on to be a champion snooker player for the police dept as well as East Anglia. I remember having one of the first Juke boxes that played 16 records and one of the first television sets, a 9 inch, where we watched the queen's coronation. I was saddened to know this pub closed and was torn down even though I had a lot of bad memories from the pub. I did have some good ones sprinkled in between.
I have a picture of the pub taken in the fifties with my father's car parked outside. If you look closely, you can see two little faces peering over the dash through the windshield...those faces belong to my brother and myself. I also have a picture taken of my 7th birthday party with a room full of children. In those days, it was an american pub. Most of the customers were from the bases located around Cambridge..Alconbury, Lakenheath and Mildenhall.

written 3rd Nov 2009 | abusive?

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