Photos credit:  Surrey County Council

Three hundred steps at Box Hill have been refurbished to encourage better sustainable access.  

The steps which cross the steep hillside linking the Stepping Stones path to the summit have been excavated and rebuilt thanks to over £53,000 of funding.  The steps were originally installed by volunteers in the 1980s but had become eroded.

The new steps have been constructed using around 15 tons of recycled plastic which has been manufactured from 7,731,360 million milk bottle tops. 

The work took three months with much of the construction being done by hand rather than machinery due to the challenging location of the steps.  

Photo above courtesy Queen Victoria Hospital.  The CT Scanner is now officially open.

The Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead has officially opened a new CT Scanner.  The Hospital has invested £750,000 to improve access to diagnostics.

The new scanner will increase the hospital’s capacity by around 20%.  It will help QVH not only reduce its own waiting list but will support other providers across Sussex, Surrey and Kent to reduce their waiting lists for CT scans. CT or computed tomography is a medical imaging technique used to gain detailed internal images of the body. 

Members of the hospital’s League of Friends attended the official opening ceremony together with the hospital’s leadership team and radiography department.  

Photo above courtesy Queen Victoria Hospital.  James Lowell, Chief Executive Officer of Queen Victoria Hospital, cuts the opening ribbon with Bob Marchant, President of the League of Friends.

Photo credit:  Labour Party.  Photo shows Sir Keir Starmer outside his childhood home in Oxted.

Former Oxted resident, Sir Keir Starmer, has been elected Prime Minister following Labour’s victory in yesterday’s General Election. 

Sir Keir grew up in Oxted.  After passing the 11 plus exam, he got a place at Reigate Grammar School which became a private school two years later for new pupils.  In 2008 he became Director of Public Prosecutions receiving a knighthood in 2014 for his services to criminal justice. 

Sir Keir Starmer was first elected to Parliament in 2015 at the age of 52 and serves as the member for Holborn and St Pancras.  He has served as the Shadow Immigration Minister and the Shadow Brexit Secretary.  Sir Keir was elected Leader of the Labour Party in 2020.