Cambridge from the outside

It was, you might say, an education...

I last visited Cambridge perhaps thirty-five years ago. Clearly I was a different person then, but whether Cambridge was a different place I’m unable to say. I remember nothing of that previous visit other than staying in a tired B&B some way from the centre. It was probably all I could afford back then.

And the Cambridge of 2024?

In a way it was a little like a theme park - and an incredibly cosmopolitan one at that. Walk along the road fronting Kings and Trinity etc. and you will hear a myriad of languages: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese. English seemed in the minority - and Chinese the most prevalent.

From our hotel room overlooking an unremarkable part of the River Cam, we saw a constant parade of visitors taking photos (often with selfie-sticks), and runners and cyclists who were clearly part of the fabric of the place. On the bench opposite, people stopped to eat their lunch or watch the heron who seemed a regular visitor.

Beneath all this surface tourism (to which we obviously added just a little) I couldn’t help but sense a kind of tension in the air - not from the tourists, but from the students furiously pedalling their bikes to get from A to B. The tension (imagined or otherwise) seemed to emanate from the burden which had been placed upon them: from the ‘un-entitled’ hoping to be clever enough to justify being there; from those hoping to be better than the next person; from those who were desperately trying to stand-out from the crowd as an individual (mainly, but not exclusively, sartorially); or those trying not to let their family down. We even overheard one (an American) on the phone to her parents and hoping that she was going to make the significant financial investment worthwhile; “value for money”.

Whilst it would probably be a great place to learn, I suspect it would be daunting too.

The colleges, viewed through their huge (and secured) gates, were almost universally splendid, with well-manicured lawns and not a leaf out of place. And the buildings themselves - and not just Kings’ Chapel! - were magnificent in their individual ways: architecturally interesting, and provoking a kind of yearning, a desire to step inside to revel, to see what all the fuss was about.

Perhaps it was envy. Or a desire to belong.

Highlights for me weren’t the colleges however, nor the kind of Disneyworld aura they seem to hint at, but the splendid Fitzwilliam Museum, the Botanical Gardens (where we saw Ian Hislop, bizarrely), and the quite remarkable Kettle’s Yard gallery. You have to pay to go in just about anywhere in Cambridge (though not the Fitzwilliam) and if you’re inclined to part with cash and like art, then go to Kettle’s Yard first. And for book-lovers, Heffers (ex-Backwells) and Waterstones are huge.

And on the personal creative front?

I arrived in the city with an idea for a new project - and left with five (thanks to Kettle’s and the Fitzwilliam). We’ll see what comes of those. And in Waterstones, I managed to leave a little sheaf of my own bookmarks on the fiction desk - both with the shop’s approval and an offer to sign any books of mine they had in stock (they had none, sadly). It was an action which saw me publicly labelled by my other & better half somewhat uproariously as ‘a tart’!

You can’t, I suppose, win them all…

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