SOS Green Belt

Please help us to protect Stapleford’s heritage!

Our organisation has been established to conserve the historic and Green Belt heritage of the village of Stapleford, Cambridge. One important element in this has been the area known as Fox Hill, situated in the Gog Magog Hills. However, we would like to know about other areas potentially under threat. There have already been exemplary efforts in the ‘Gogs’ – the Magog Trust, for example - to conserve these hills. The Fox Hill part of the parish of Stapleford is in this same Green Belt area, offering open hillsides unique in Cambridgeshire and forming a protective brake on the overdevelopment of the historic University city of Cambridge and its surrounding villages.

Traditionally, Fellows of the Colleges of Cambridge University were required to be celibate and live in the Colleges. When restrictions on marriage were lifted in the late nineteenth century, Fellows of the University began increasingly to live outside the Colleges and then outside Cambridge itself, and it was Fox Hill, in the parish of Stapleford, that some of the more adventurous Fellows chose for their home in the early Edwardian period. Major architects were employed to build houses – Alkinson, Flockhart and Lutyens. Journals such as Country Life ran features on the resulting buildings at the time, and Fox Hill’s houses have found their place in the written histories of Cambridge itself.

This same part of Stapleford thereafter protected its surroundings with a WWII bomb shelter, for example, built by another University don, and a WWII tank trap was constructed nearby. It is also an area to which the current Prince of Wales is said to have enjoyed retreating when he was an undergraduate at the University.

Considerable effort has been expended in recent times to preserve the historic, architectural heritage of this area. The historic scale, layout and design of the houses on this Hill have been carefully preserved. The bomb shelter has also been maintained in good condition. In order to conserve the openness and rural surroundings of the Cambridge and Stapleford Green Belt of which it is a part, Fox Hill’s inhabitants have turned over their land to activities such as sheep-rearing, bee-keeping, a cider orchard (with traditional cider apple trees), and Stapleford’s only vineyard.

If you would like to know more, please e-mail us at enquiries@sosgreenbelt.org.uk.