SEATS OF LEARNING
Spires and vistas offer the promise of a better life – the gaining of knowledge, cultural and social inspiration …
These old university towns have much in common. There is little evidence of industrialisation and there are myriad green spaces close to the centre. Water is key – the Isis and the Cherwell in Oxford, the Cam in Cambridge (and of course the punting tradition in both). The colleges dominate the topography of the centre, warping the ‘natural expansion’ of the town in a particular direction (north in Oxford, east in Cambridge) away from college land.
They tend to be politically engaged – campaigning groups and ‘Friends’ groups are especially vociferous – and to favour progressive politics (both cities voted Remain in 2016; in the 2017 General Election, two Labour MPs were elected, one Lib Dem and no Conservative). There is a thriving cultural scene with theatres and festivals, and world-famous libraries and museums. For all these reasons, they are very popular tourist destinations with the highest ratios of visitor nights to population of any of the cities we visit (Cambridge 4.1:1, Oxford 3.9:1); and they are also popular cities for young families to move to in search of the ‘good life’.
Maybe because they are so similar, the two universities seem to go out of their way to do some things differently:
CAMBRIDGE |
OXFORD |
COURTS |
QUADS |
SUPERVISIONS |
TUTORIALS |
BEDDERS |
SCOUTS |
PUNTERS STAND ON THE END PLATFORM – THE ‘CAMBRIDGE END’ |
PUNTERS STAND INSIDE THE BOAT AT THE OTHER END – THE ‘OXFORD END’ |
Ph.D. |
D.Phil. |
COLLEGE STAIRCASES ASSIGNED LETTERS |
COLLEGE STAIRCASES NUMBERED |
FLAT BUT NEVER DULL
Cambridge
This walk takes you past many of the classic university sites of the city, but also to places that you will never have seen before, even if you live here or studied here. In half a day you will feel like an insider!
Cambridge is a city still defined by academia. The most prominent (if plain) building remains Giles Gilbert Scott’s 1930s University Library, only 157 feet in height but visible from miles around; for this is a very flat landscape, ideal for the cyclists you will encounter around every corner, often heading straight for you!
The dominance of the colleges in the landscape has meant a city grid that is skewed, with almost all of the nineteenth-century development taking place to the east of the city away from the colleges. The railway station was also relegated to the south-east edge of the city, apparently to discourage undergraduates from hopping on the train down to London and neglecting their studies.
However, the huge benefit of this tight collegiate land ownership has been the large green open spaces that have remained intact, along the Backs, the river to Grantchester and also the numerous sports fields.
The name ‘the Backs’ refers to the backs of the colleges. In the sixteenth century, the area consisted of pasture, gardens and orchards owned by the colleges, with wooden bridges across the Cam. Over time, the colleges planted avenues of trees and built sturdier bridges. In 1772, Capability Brown laid out a wilderness behind St John’s College. This ‘rus in urbe’ vision continues to this day, with sheep in front of King’s, wild areas, specimen trees and vistas, making it one of the most picturesque spots in the country. Punting, which is an integral part of this rural idyll and looks like it has been around for ever, was surprisingly only introduced in 1903, when Jack Scudamore spotted the tourist potential.
The other very noticeable feature of Cambridge has been its pedestrian and cyclist-friendly policies. The city centre has been barred to traffic for many years and is consequently a delightful space to wander through, full of interesting shops and cafés.
THE WALK
We start our walk at the Grantchester Tea Rooms, which proudly makes the claim that ‘more famous people have taken tea here than anywhere else in the world’. We peep into the Orchard on our way to the river, half expecting to see a group of academics in earnest conversation in old green deckchairs, with ancient bikes propped against the apple trees and a fair sprinkling of beards, sandals and eccentricities; and that is exactly what we do see.
If we had passed through a century or so ago, we might well have witnessed a very similar-looking gathering, the ‘Grantchester Group’, comprising Rupert Brooke, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, Augustus John, John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig Wittgenstein. They spent their days in animated discourse and enjoying the nature around them, ‘in Arcadia’, as Brooke described it.
This stretch along Grantchester Meadows (40 hectares, 99 acres) was also a favourite spot of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, who would wander here together at unusual hours. She wrote: ‘Got up at 4.30 a.m. this day with Ted and went for a long walk to Grantchester. I felt a peace and joy in the most beautiful world with animals and birds. We began mooing at a pasture of cows, and they all looked up, and as if hypnotised, began to follow us in a crowd of about twenty across the pasture to a wooden stile, staring fascinated. I stood on the stile and, in a resonant voice, recited all I knew of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for about twenty minutes. I never had such an intelligent, fascinated audience.’
We skirt past Scudamore’s Boat Hire, over Queen’s Bridge and then head along the Backs to the finest view in Cambridge, King’s Chapel and Clare College – gazing across the Cam and a meadow with sheep grazing in it. King’s College Chapel, made famous the world over by its Christmas carols, dates back to the fifteenth century and is one of the finest, most graceful examples of late Perpendicular Gothic in the country.
Trinity Great Court (1600s) is the largest fully enclosed green space in the land. Sir Isaac Newton had his rooms here, as did Lord Byron, who shared them with a pet bear. It is also famous for the Great Court Run, which involves attempting to run around the perimeter within the time that it takes the college clock to strike twelve. In 2007 Sam Dobin, a second-year undergraduate reading Economics, made it round within the sound of the final chime, although fierce debate still persists as to whether it was permissible to transgress from the flagstones onto the cobbles to moderate the sharpness of the corners.
A large fountain sits at the centre of Great Court. Until recently the fountain had its own water supply via a conduit from a spring a mile and a half to the west of the College (it might be fun to trace that route one day). Look up above the college gates and you will see a statue of the college’s founder, Henry VIII. Some years ago, his sceptre was replaced with a chair leg as an undergraduate prank. When a bicycle pump was inserted in its place by a subsequent prankster, the authorities determined that the original prank took precedence, and reinstated the chair leg, which is what we see to this day.
‘How could the wind be so strong, so far inland, that cyclists coming into the town in the late afternoon looked more like sailors in peril?’ PENELOPE FITZGERALD
Heading to the top of Trinity Street we reach the Round Church (1160), one of the oldest buildings in Cambridge, and one of only four medieval round churches still in use in England, its shape inspired by the rotunda in the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
As we stroll down the quaint, flower-bedecked Portugal Street, we spot a swirly yellow metal sculpture above the door of 19 Portugal Place. This was where Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, lived in the 1950s; and the ‘sculpture’ represents a single helix, to commemorate his dwelling there.
We walk across Jesus Green (11 hectares, 27 acres) alongside the river. The dozen or so canal boats moored here hint at a different side to Cambridge – a more alternative and ‘green’ character that has long been alive in the city alongside the academia. Canal boats are the model of space efficiency – kitchen, bathroom, living and sleeping areas all within a 40-square-metre space. And on the roofs, bikes, firewood, herbs, flowers, vegetable plots, even a doghouse.
Midsummer Common (12 hectares, 30 acres) is host to Cambridge’s plushest restaurant – the two-Michelin-starred Midsummer House, full of well-heeled regulars and hoi poloi on very special occasions. It is also home to the city’s most multicultural fair, the Strawberry Fair, held every June, a mix of outlandish clothes, global food, exotic smells and eclectic music, organised ‘by the people of Cambridge, for the people of Cambridge’. It’s this mix of life that makes Cambridge such a special city. And the common is still used for grazing cows too, so just check out the ground first if you plan to have a picnic here.
By the early years of the nineteenth century, overcrowded parish churchyards had become a serious problem in Cambridge, as they had in most UK cities, and a new burial ground outside the town was needed. Mill Road Cemetery was built in the 1840s when it was still agricultural land on the edge of the town.
One of the most influential designers of the period was John Claudius Loudon, who laid out Cambridge’s nearby Histon Road Cemetery. He believed everyone should have access to green ‘breathing spaces’ within towns, and his vision was that well-planned and well-managed cemeteries, once full, could become the public gardens of the future. Which is pretty much how Mill Road Cemetery works today, in a slightly run-down but charming way: orange-tip butterflies flit from grave to grave and there is a profusion of wild flowers.
We eventually drag ourselves out of the cemetery along a delightful tree-lined avenue back into the bustle of the multi-ethnic Mill Road and thence to Parker’s Piece (10 hectares, 25 acres). Now, although in many ways this prairie-like space looks unremarkable, it played a key role in our footballing history. In the early nineteenth century, village football teams would arrive brandishing rival rules to the game, which they each affixed to a nearby tree, and got down to sporting business, usually involving large doses of roughness and certainly very little passing of the ball.
Trinity Hall’s modern Jerwood Library blends perfectly into the medieval buildings around it
Jesus Green is a great place to escape the city centre bustle
King’s College Chapel is one of the most graceful examples of late Perpendicular Gothic
A visit to Cambridge is not complete without a visit to the Botanic Garden
‘Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.’ ZADIE SMITH
But over time, maybe as injuries and arguments mounted, so a common set of football rules emerged, emphasising skill above force, which forbade catching the ball and the ‘hacking’ that had up until then been the norm. These ‘Cambridge Rules’ eventually became the cornerstone of the 1863 Football Association Rules.
We move on now to the last part of our journey and the bit that most people will know least about. At the end of Lensfield Road, we come across Hobson’s Conduit, marked by a Tudor Fountain that was originally in the Market Square but moved here in 1856. Thomas Hobson is well known in Cambridge for his conduit; but his claim to everlasting fame is the phrase ‘Hobson’s Choice’, which of course means no real choice at all. He kept a stable of horses which he would hire out in strict rotation, the customer having to accept whichever horse he was offered, or none at all! Hence the phrase.
In 1610, Hobson helped finance the building of a conduit to convey fresh water to the centre of Cambridge from the springs in Nine Wells, near Trumpington, no doubt for the benefit of his trusty steeds. It is still very much in evidence today; in ‘runnels’ alongside Trumpington Street, past the Fitzwilliam Museum; and in the southerly direction (which we are taking) pretty much in its original state, a wide and shallow stream.
The Botanic Garden of Cambridge University was founded in 1762 in the centre of the City, now the New Museums Site. It was conceived as a typical Renaissance physic garden, inspired by the Chelsea Physic Garden in London. It grew herbaceous plants used in the teaching of medical students at the University. Today’s much larger Botanic Garden (16 hectares, 40 acres) was founded in 1846 by John Stevens Henslow, Professor of Botany at Cambridge. He laid out the garden to accommodate an extensive tree collection, and also started to develop ideas about variation and the nature of species that would be taken up by his famous student, Charles Darwin. The plant collections were so appealing to Victorian collectors that visitors were required to doff their hats on departure to prove that they weren’t hiding away any rare cuttings.
South of the Botanic Garden, Hobson’s Conduit becomes a much narrower stream, passing through the pretty Empty Common Allotments. There are forty-seven ‘ten-rod’ allotments for rent from the council. A rod is an old measurement dating back to Anglo-Saxon times; and ten rods (250 square metres, about the size of a doubles tennis court) is judged to be the area required to feed a large family.
Trinity College’s original gates in Garret Hostel Lane
Hobson’s Conduit meanders among the allotments
Clare College reflects every era of Georgian architecture
The day we pass through there is plenty of activity. The allotment holders seem to be roughly split between the ‘flat cap’ brigade, perhaps escaping from household chores, growing mainly traditional root vegetables; and the younger ‘urban farmer’ brigade, in ethnic-style dress, intent on growing more challenging crops – herbs, salads, exotic vegetables, flowers – and a neatly arranged stack of rotting logs so that their kids can hunt for wildlife and learn about the countryside. After years of decline, allotments are back in fashion, at least in Cambridge. Fifty plots were added to this site in the last few years, and there are still nearly 300 people on the council’s waiting list.
At the far end of the allotments, we take a detour through the tiny Clare Woods, supposedly a favoured habitat for bats – we feel we are deep in the countryside! Then alongside the Guided Busway, past the massive structure of Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Founded in 1766, relocated here in the 1960s from its original Trumpington Street site (now the Business School), and progressively expanding to campus-style proportions, it is undoubtedly the biggest architectural structure that we will see today; a centre of medical excellence, but sadly a complete mishmash of nothing very particular in terms of architectural styles.
Finally, we cut through a residential part of Grantchester village, taking a detour to Byron’s Pool, well worth it if you still have the energy left. These days it is a nature reserve; once it was the spot where Lord Byron regularly took a swim (we know not if the pet bear came too). We get back just in time for tea and a large slice of cake at the Orchard Tea Garden. Perfect.
‘RIVER-ROUNDED’
Oxford
With two rivers as your path for much of the route, this walk takes you through the city’s finest green spaces both tamed and untamed, past great architecture from many eras and a glorious view of the ‘dreaming spires’.
Oxford is a city shaped by its rivers and colleges. The River Thames (Isis) to the west and south and the River Cherwell to the east define the old boundaries of the town, with the oldest buildings (mainly the colleges) to the south where the rivers join, and new housing stretching northwards through the centuries as the town expanded towards Summertown.
Oxford is consistently named among the world’s top universities, and can claim many ‘firsts’:
• The first British university, dating back to the twelfth century
• The earliest botanic garden, opened in 1621
• The world’s first university museum, the Ashmolean, founded in 1683
While Oxford developed a significant manufacturing base throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (best known being the Cowley car plant), all the development was outside the core and you get no sense of it on this walk (unlike Manchester or Leeds, for example).
From the 1920s onwards, it became viewed as a city of two halves, summed up in the saying that ‘Oxford is the left bank of Cowley’.
The compactness of the central area has inevitably meant special traffic challenges. The city has perforce been an innovator, becoming the first in the country to establish a Park and Ride scheme in 1973 and still having one of the largest urban Park and Ride networks in the UK. It also has extensive bus and cycle lanes, which means that 17 per cent of people cycle to work (second only to Cambridge). As we discover, it’s also an exceptionally agreeable city to walk around in, with more green spaces in the centre than just about anywhere else, and of course many stunning buildings to ogle at too.
THE WALK
Heading north out of the station, we soon come across the old track of the Varsity Line, dubbed ‘the Brain Line’, that linked Oxford with Cambridge until it was ripped up in a late-1960s post-Beeching purge.
Young mathematicians, linguists and off-the-wall thinkers would have trundled out of here very ‘hush hush’ during the Second World War on their way to ‘Station X’, the code breaking centre at Bletchley Park. Roy Jenkins, for example, who was an undergraduate at Balliol, went up to Bletchley in 1943 and was put to work cracking the Tunny codes. He subsequently became Chancellor of the university. There is much talk of the line being restored.
The Thames, as it runs through Oxford, is called the Isis; the reason is lost in the mists of time, but the Victorians insisted it was a distinct river until it met the River Thame at Dorchester-on-Thames and therefore merited its own Latin name. We follow the right bank up to the footbridge which takes us on to Port Meadow. It was under this bridge that the Reverend Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) rowed upstream one summer’s day in 1862 with Alice and her two sisters. He began at their request to make up a story that later was expanded into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Port Meadow (178 hectares, 440 acres) is the largest area of common land in Oxford. Since it was gifted to the Freemen of Oxford in the tenth century by Alfred the Great, by way of thanking them for helping defend his kingdom against the marauding Danes, it has been used for just about every purpose imaginable in its long unfurrowed existence; from grazing horses and cattle, to horseracing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (low stone bridges laid over washes and ditches for this purpose still survive) to warfare (there are foundations of the fortifications from the Parliamentary siege of Oxford during the English Civil War here) to military encampments in both world wars; to ‘make love not war’ in the shape of free festivals and raves in the 1980s and 1990s (which the police tried to control with a specially re-enforced tractor that enabled them to navigate the boggy bits). Today it is used for leisure of all sorts – walking, running, and, when the meadows are flooded and frozen over, skating.
And as if that weren’t enough, there are several Bronze Age round barrows and an area of Iron Age settlement; plus, it is also a Site of Special Scientific Interest, with many species of birds and flowers. The fact that it has never been ploughed has made it a wildlife haven.
We soon find ourselves in North Parade, famously and somewhat incongruously situated to the south of South Parade. Apparently, during the Civil War when Charles I was besieged by Oliver Cromwell at Oxford, South Parade was the Roundhead southern front, whilst North Parade was the location of the Royalist northern front. Apocryphal or not, I like that story. Today the street is very far from a ‘front line’, replete with indie shops, trendy restaurants and an open food market.
From North Parade we cross into the heart of North Oxford, one of the country’s finest Victorian residential areas, full of huge mansions with every imaginable High Victorian architectural twiddle: statement porches at the top of flights of steps, large bays, brick patterns, complicated rooflines, crenellations, plaques and crests and many spires and larger-than-strictly-necessary chimneystacks. From the 1860s onwards, it was developed for the wealthy merchants of Oxford by St John’s College, but today it is typically inhabited by successful academics and Londoners seeking more space and cultured living, as well as a smattering of student digs evidenced by the piles of bikes stacked outside some of the dwellings.
Butterfield’s last masterpiece in brick, Keble College Chapel is pure Victoriana
‘One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.’ WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
We are fascinated by Park Town (1850s), the first planned middle-class estate in the area, comprising seventy houses in total. Samuel Seckham, the architect, had a constricted space to work with, but ingeniously managed to create an estate that combined terraces and villas. Part of the scheme depended on sacrificing large back gardens for communal gardens and planting in the central area. Behind Park Town is the Dragon School, which numbers among its Old Dragons both the actor Emma Watson and Sir John Betjeman, a hero of preserving Victorian architecture. Maybe it was having regularly walked past such fine examples of Victoriana as a boy that made him such a passionate devotee.
The University Parks (30 hectares, 74 acres) feel pretty much like the heart of Oxford today, but used to be part of the fields to the north of the city. They were officially created in 1853, but the space was used for leisure long before that. Charles II is reputed to have walked his dog here. On the south-west of the park you can just see the splendid, polychromatic brick Keble College Chapel (1876) built by the great Victorian architect William Butterfield.
One of the objectives in laying out the Parks was the provision of facilities for team sport for members of the university, and this is still very much in evidence as we stroll through today. It is home to the Oxford University Cricket Club and a venue for first-class cricket matches. The sporting tradition has also seen a more recent novelty with the park becoming the home of the Oxford Quidditch league. Now Quidditch, as I’m sure you will recall, is the fictional game played in the Harry Potter books requiring impossible feats of aerobatics. Somehow, the enterprising students of Oxford have managed to create a ‘ground’ version of the game and codified it in the official Rulebook, the IQA, which was formally adopted in 2012; since which time there have been many inter-college, inter-university and even international games.
Provision of a bathing place alongside the river featured in the earliest discussions on the recreational use of the Parks. Parson’s Pleasure, close to the rollerway that transports punts around the weir, was reserved for the use of male members of the university, and became a popular place for nude bathing. Similarly, Dame’s Delight on the river bank opposite Mesopotamia Walk was reserved for ladies’ bathing.
One anecdote has it that a number of dons were sunbathing nude at Parson’s Pleasure when a female student floated by in a punt. All but one of the startled dons covered their genitals – Maurice Bowra placed a flannel over his head instead. When asked why he had done that, he replied haughtily, ‘I don’t know about you, gentlemen, but in Oxford, I, at least, am known by my face’.
‘There are few greater temptations on earth than to stay permanently at Oxford in meditation.’ HILAIRE BELLOC
Mesopotamia is a narrow island, about half a mile long but not much wider than a tennis court, that lies between the upper and lower levels of the River Cherwell, just south of Parson’s Pleasure. The name Mesopotamia in Greek means ‘between the rivers’ and originally referred to the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present-day Iraq.
We have the sensation at this point of being in deepest countryside – celandines and willows all around us, looking across the river and over a field of cut reeds in the sunshine, beyond which small figures of walkers and cyclists are moving peaceably to and fro. A living embodiment of the pastoral idyll.
In the distance to our right we can just see St Catherine’s College (1962), the quintessence of cool modernism with a dash of Arts and Crafts. Every detail, from the cutlery and furniture to the landscaping, was worked through by the Danish architect Arne Jacobsen.
We climb the slope and cross into South Park (20 hectares, 50 acres) and one of the most iconic vistas of any city in Britain – the Jude the Obscure view, gazing over the spires of Oxford and dreaming of what might just be possible … We whoop down the hill in delight, through a space where many of the city’s festivals, fairs and fireworks displays take place.
South Park only became a protected and public space fairly recently: the land was privately owned by the Morrell family of Headington Hill Hall until 1932, and was farmed. The Oxford Preservation Trust bought the land in 1932, and in 1959 gave it to the City of Oxford to be preserved as an open space for the benefit of the public.
When you think Oxford, you tend to think ancient buildings, but look out for the Florey Building (1960s) on the right along St Clement’s. Designed by James Stirling as student accommodation for Queen’s College, its unusual sculptural shape and bold use of bright red brick divided taste when it was built.
Heading back into the centre now, we cross Magdalen Bridge. The annual May Day celebration starts here at first light with the Magdalen College Choir singing the ‘Hymnus Eucharisticus’ from the top of the Magdalen Tower, a tradition that goes back over 500 years. Large crowds gather under the tower along the High Street and on the bridge, many the worse for wear after all-night balls, incongruously attired for such an early hour in formal wear and tiaras.
Mesopotamia is a long narrow island in the River Cherwell
Punting along the River Cherwell is a quintessential Oxford experience
Osney Power Station is a reminder of the city’s industrial side
Christ Church has glorious views over The Meadows
The Botanic Garden was an inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
The tradition of jumping off the bridge into the River Cherwell, which I also imagined to be steeped in tradition, apparently only began in the early 1980s. It was banned in 2005 after half the hundred or so jumpers required medical treatment due to the shallowness of the water.
Nearly as old as the May Day celebrations, The University of Oxford Botanic Garden (1.8 hectares, 4.4 acres) is the oldest botanic garden in the country and one of the oldest and most important scientific gardens in the world, dating back to 1621. It was founded as a physic garden growing plants for medicinal research. Lewis Carroll was a frequent visitor and it provided another source of inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: the garden’s water lily house can be seen in the background of Sir John Tenniel’s illustration of the Queen’s croquet-ground.
Finally, the tour de force of our walk, Christ Church Meadows (23 hectares, 57 acres). Roughly triangular in shape, it is bounded by the River Thames, the River Cherwell and Christ Church College (1525). On a summer’s day it is flocked with people walking, picnicking, enjoying the river and (a few) even revising.
Being a big open space, people have also wanted to use the Meadows for getting places. James Sadler made the first ascent in a balloon by an Englishman from here in 1784. The balloon apparently rose to a height of around 3,600 feet and landed six miles away. More alarmingly, the Meadows were also earmarked for a relief road in the early 1960s. What became known as the Jellicoe Plan was unveiled in 1963 and consisted of a landscaped, sunken road through the middle of the meadow. Thankfully the plan eventually got kicked into the long grass. How our attitudes have changed; nowadays we are much more protective of our special green spaces.
From here we take the delightful river route (south and west side) past the city’s first power station, the Old Osney Power Station (1892), back to the railway station, pausing to admire the Saïd Business School (2002).