The names recorded on Elsenham’s Roll of Honour are more than a list of those who served during the First World War. Together they provide a record of a village whose people answered the call to serve between 1914 and 1919, and of the families whose lives were permanently changed by the conflict.
North West Essex MP Kemi Badenoch has said she has written urgently to Uttlesford District Council, a Government minister and London Stansted Airport after receiving further information from residents about the unauthorised airport parking operation at New Farm in Elsenham.
Look up at an old thatched cottage, and there is every chance the finest piece of craftsmanship is not the roof itself, but the small ornament standing proudly along its ridge.
There comes a point every summer when the village collectively stops asking whether the roadworks are finished and instead begins asking which road has volunteered itself next. June has now answered that question with the confidence of a man arriving at a barbecue carrying only an empty plate. The operational map has shifted once again. New Road is preparing to disappear behind barriers for five days; temporary traffic lights have multiplied like particularly determined rabbits; Stansted’s approaches remain wrapped in utility works; the M11 Junction 8 continues its nightly impression of organised confusion; and even Tye Green Road has received official notice that its turn is coming. Somewhere inside Central Operations Command, someone quietly unfolded a larger map.
Mud from a construction site has been left on Robin Hood Road in Elsenham, with debris visible up the road, across the roundabouts and continuing along the High Street towards the village school.
At the start of the millennium, Elsenham was a village of around 2,500 people. Surrounded by farmland and characterised by its railway station, historic core and close proximity to Stansted Airport, it occupied a distinctive position between rural Essex and a rapidly changing regional economy.
An Elsenham Parish Council Planning Committee meeting was unable to proceed on Wednesday, 17 June, after too few councillors were present to form a quorum.
“The Robin Hood” Public House in, surprise, surprise, Robin Hood Road is sadly no longer an Inn, once the spiritual home of the also-gone, but never-forgotten Elsenham Football Club. Sorry to say, the demise of the Village’s Eleven contributed to its demise. Our own “Footy” boys drank the Pub dry at least once. Their disbanding was a great loss to Ernie & Rennee Atkinson’s income.
May arrived in Elsenham carrying two developments that nobody had expected to encounter at the same time. The first was sunshine. The second was optimism. Both were regarded with immediate suspicion.
​March arrived in Elsenham with the reassuring certainty that somewhere, in some hedgerow-framed corner of the village, a minor administrative situation was quietly escalating into something with the energy of a diplomatic incident. As the month unfolded, reports filtered through Tesco aisles, Central Operations Command briefings, and the allotment grapevine that several operational theatres had opened simultaneously, each insisting on attention, none willing to wait their turn, and all now complicated by the growing sense that even the weather had joined the agenda.
