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The changing city
The transformation of Cambridge quickened from the 1970s onwards. Ancient, down-at-heel, but undeniably picturesque, Petty Cury was swept away to be replaced by the Lion Yard shopping centre, library and multi-storey car park, a sacrifice of ‘character’ to amenity which grieved many. In the words of Charles Mosley and Clive Wilmer, local residents and members of the university’s English Faculty:
… few cities, even in those barbarous decades, can have had quite so much of their ancient heart ripped out of them, to be replaced with the tawdry: Lion Yard and the new Petty Cury are already [1998] dated and the City Fathers responsible immortalised their vandalism with their names grandiose and smug on a stumpy, ugly pillar outside St Andrew’s church …
– a self-tribute you can probably afford to miss.
To the south-west, between East Road and Maid’s Causeway, a large part of a well-built working-class residential area, known from its outline as ‘the Kite’, gave way in 1984 to a shopping complex, the Grafton Centre. After more than a decade of neglect, the Corn Exchange was refurbished as a concert venue in 1986. Despite the opening of the Elizabeth Bridge (1971) and the rebuilding of Magdalene Bridge (1988) and Victoria Bridge (1992), traffic and parking remained seemingly intractable problems, although cycle routes were established and the pedestrianisation of Sidney Street diminished hazards to shoppers in a busy retail area.
In 1990 The Junction opened as Britain’s first purpose-built youth venue, and in 1999 the Parkside pool was rebuilt. The much-loved Cambridge landmark department stores Joshua Taylor and Eaden Lilley closed in 1992 and 1999 respectively, although the building of the Grand Arcade allowed their old rival, Robert Sayle, to survive. Heffer’s, another business named after its founder, had been established in Fitzroy Street in 1876 by Fen farmworker’s son William Heffer. Originally selling hymn books and stationery, it had moved to Petty Cury and diversified into printing and publishing. Reuben George Heffer, grandson of the founder, built up its specialist output in medicine, phonetics and oriental studies. The destruction of Petty Cury forced a move to No 20 Trinity Street, but it remained a family business until 1999, when control shifted to another family business – Blackwell’s of Oxford.
Tourist trail
Writing of the summer of 1760, the Pembroke poet Thomas Gray had observed that ‘Cambridge is a delight of a place, now there is nobody in it.’ His friend and fellow poet Christopher ‘Kit’ Smart (1722–1771) disagreed:
At length arrives the dull Vacation,
And all around is Desolation.
Not any more. Although modern Cambridge was unconcerned to promote itself as a visitor destination, tourism has continued to expand until its contribution to the local economy accounted for in excess of 5,000 jobs. The visitor presence – and ‘spend’ – also significantly revitalised such areas as Green Street, King Street and the quayside around Magdalene. Shops increasingly began to cater to visitors’ whims rather than students’ needs. The Cambridge Festival (1961–92), Folk Festival (from 1965), Beer Festival (from 1974) and Film Festival (from 1977) may have boosted numbers. A corps of professionally-trained Blue Badge guides developed to steer visitors deftly through colleges and courts. Open-topped tourist buses began to circumnavigate the streets from 1987 onwards and in 1991 a Holiday Inn opened on Downing Street. Between 1975 and 1997 the annual number of visitors more than doubled to pass 3,500,000. Six out of ten were from overseas, half of those from Europe. Their passage was usually fleeting, two out of three visiting for a single day or part of one. Research revealed that the great majority of visitors never ventured more than a quarter of a mile from Market Hill, leaving Kettle’s Yard and the Fitzwilliam to the adventurous – or those who had bothered to read a guidebook.
Contrary to widespread local perception, fewer than one in ten visitors arrived by coach. Half came by car, further aggravating the chronic problems of congestion and parking. Fortunately, however, the tourist influx reached its peak between July and September, when undergraduates were absent, although their rooms were usually occupied, as colleges belatedly began to capitalise on the appeal of their architecture, accommodation and facilities by hosting conferences and summer schools during the vacations. Another significant sector of employment and expenditure emerged with the proliferation of language schools teaching English.
‘Monstrous regiment’?
In the early 1970s females accounted for less than ten per cent of the undergraduate body; nowadays they make up almost half. The exclusive Apostles admitted its first female members in 1971. In 1972 Churchill, Clare and King’s became the first all-male colleges to admit women as undergraduates. Realising that they were denying themselves students of real quality, the rest of the ‘men only’ colleges followed, though Magdalene held out until 1988. Colleges accordingly found themselves faced with challenges with regard to the provision of bathrooms, the acceptance of sexual relationships between students and the novel issue of female drunkenness.
In 1978 Girton likewise began to admit men. Newnham resisted the trend to co-education. Instead it achieved another feminist landmark with the first university building designed by a woman, Elizabeth Whitworth Scott (1898–1972). Her Fawcett Building was named for Philippa Fawcett (1868–1948), who gained the highest marks in the mathematics examinations of 1890, despite the fact that her gender would deny her an actual degree. The Cambridge Union remained an all-male bastion until 1963, but then changed swiftly to elect its first woman president, Ann (now Baroness) Mallalieu, in 1967. (By 2005–6 the office had been held by three women in succession.) Rosemary Murray became the university’s first female Vice-Chancellor. In 1992 the city elected Anne Campbell as its first female Member of Parliament. In 2003 anthropologist Alison Richard, a former Newnham undergraduate, became the university’s 344th Vice-Chancellor and the first female to hold the post full time. The last unquestioned male citadel crumbled when Jesus appointed a woman, Helen Stephens, as a porter; she subsequently became Deputy Head Porter at Trinity and in 2009 made history yet again by becoming the first female Head Porter, at Selwyn.
Revolting students
Compared to some other universities, post-war Cambridge experienced only minor disorders in terms of student activism. In 1967 a protest banner against the Vietnam War was suspended from the roof of King’s College Chapel. In 1968 a visit by the Defence Minister was accompanied by fistfights. In 1969 a visit by the US Ambassador prompted a ‘sit-in’ at the Old Schools. In 1970 a city-wide ‘Greek Week’ to promote tourism to that country – then under the rule of a military junta – culminated in a dinner at the Garden House Hotel which attracted a crowd of some hundreds of protesters. The occasion was disrupted. Diners were jostled. Damage and violence may not have been intended but occurred. The police made arrests. The sentencing of half a dozen undergraduates to prison terms was generally regarded as disproportionately heavy-handed. In the same year the recently-established Student Union addressed an issue of more widespread concern by organising protests against the college practice of charging for meals that one might not eat and closing their gates at night. The changing demographic profile of the student body was underlined in 1975 by a sit-in at the Senate House as part of a campaign for nursery provision. In 1976 there was a sit-in at the University Library to agitate for longer opening hours.
More new colleges
The expansion of the university continued. By 2007 the 8,500 undergraduates of 1976 had become 11,000. Over the same period the university’s operating budget increased from £27,000,000 to £600,000,000, one-third of the latter generated from research contracts. Specialised centres of expertise were established, devoted to such diverse areas of investigation as the Study of Human Evolution, Mongolian and Inner Asian Studies, Psychometrics, Atmospheric Science, Autism and Brain Mapping.
The archetypal reclusive millionaire, Sir David Robinson (1904–1987) left school at 15, worked in his parents’ bicycle shop in Cambridge, made a fortune from the TV rental business and put up £18,000,000 for a brand new college, opened by the Queen in 1981. Ranged along a road, rather than around a courtyard, the buildings still featured such traditional features as a gatehouse, complete with tower and ‘drawbridge’, and were built of hand-made brick. Robinson was the first college to be founded specifically for both men and women, and with the acknowledgment that it would play a major role as a conference centre during vacations. David Robinson also put up half the £6,000,000 cost of a state-of-the-art maternity hospital for Cambridge, named Rosie after his mother, which opened in 1983.
Homerton and Hughes Hall, former teacher training institutions, were absorbed into the university in 1977 and 1985 respectively. Homerton was by 2001 the largest college in Cambridge, achieving full collegiate status in 2010. In 1992 the city’s former polytechnic achieved university status as Anglia Ruskin, with outlying campuses at Chelmsford and Colchester in neighbouring Essex.
The Cambridge phenomenon
While Cambridge was never a particularly industrial town, over the course of the 20th century it spawned some significant industrial enterprises, including the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company (1881), Pye and Co (1896) and Marshall’s (1909). These companies were all technology-based, drew at least partially on university expertise and were located around the fringes of the city. University scientists had also created specialist businesses whose unvarnished names implied a deliberately downbeat, almost self-deprecating, approach to the market-place – Aero Research, Metals Research, Cambridge Consultants Ltd.
National Institutes for Plant Breeding, Agricultural Botany, Animal Physiology, Animal Nutrition and Welding also existed around the urban periphery. In 1968 the government decided on Cambridge as the appropriate location for a national Computer-Aided Design Centre. A favourable national context was also emerging. By the 1960s East Anglia was Britain’s fastest-growing region in terms of population. The opening of the M11 motorway to London in 1980 and the subsequent upgrading of Stansted to become London’s third airport banished the traditional isolation of the Fen-bound city.
These trends prompted a change of heart within the university and the city. Whereas they had formerly endorsed Holford’s block on urban growth and the ‘intrusion’ of industry – to the extent of rejecting outright major initiatives from Tube Investments and IBM – in 1969 the Senate approved a report from future Nobel Laureate Nevill Mott (1905–1996), head of the Cavendish Laboratory, which proposed the encouragement of links between the university and science-based industries.
The pioneering initiative came, however, not from the university itself but from Trinity College. Pre-eminent in science, wealthy and well-connected, Trinity proposed to develop former farm land three miles from the city centre which had been owned by the college for four centuries and last used as a tank-proving ground during World War Two but had since lain derelict. Led by Dr (now Sir) John Bradfield, a Cavendish zoologist and Senior Bursar of Trinity, the college in 1970 committed itself to creating a 130 acre Science Park just off the A14, north of Chesterton. The first tenant, Laser-Scan, a computer graphics company formed by three Cavendish researchers, moved onto the site in 1973. The businesses that followed – on Trinity’s site and elsewhere – were also locally-established, capitalised on university research and skilled personnel, attracted foreign capital and entrepreneurial expertise and used cutting-edge technologies to exploit new niche markets, not only in computer-related areas but also in pharmaceuticals, plant genetics, printing, drilling, vaccines, lasers, freeze-drying and precision imaging. By 1975, 30 acres of the Trinity site had been occupied; by 1982, 86 acres; by 1996, all of it. The site was later extended by incorporating adjacent land owned by Trinity Hall.
Trinity’s initiative was warmly praised in 1979 by the newly-elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, herself a former postgraduate research chemist. The phrase ‘Cambridge Phenomenon’ was coined by Peta Levi in an article in the Financial Times in 1980. In 1985 Oxford economist Nick Segal published a book-length account of The Cambridge Phenomenon, which by then had attracted some 260 technology-based firms employing 13,700 people. By 1987 Trinity’s Science Park alone had 65 tenants and Cambridge as a whole almost 500 technological companies. In 1988 St John’s opened its own Innovation Centre – opposite Trinity’s venture – on land it had owned for six centuries.
Throughout the post-war period Cambridge University Press benefited from the expansion of higher education in the English-speaking world, from Commonwealth demand for school textbooks and from the worldwide hunger to master the English language, which now accounts for a third of its global turnover. A masterly reorganisation of the Press by chief executive Geoffrey Cass secured it a charitable status, relieving it of significant taxation. Closing the London premises to relocate all operations to Cambridge enabled Cass to house the entire publishing staff in imposing new buildings on Shaftesbury Road in 1981. In 1992 CUP took over the corner shop at No 1 Trinity Street, where books have been sold since 1581, making it the oldest bookselling site in Britain. Not content with these successes, by 1996 the company had expanded to the point that it could boast more than 20,000 authors in 98 countries; its all-time best-seller was no longer the Bible but Murphy’s English Grammar in Use, which had sold over 16,000,000 copies by 2009.
In 1990 former Cambridge graduate Paul Judge, creator of Premier Foods, put up £8,000,000 to establish the Judge Institute of Management Studies. The Italianate Addenbrooke’s Hospital of 1864–5 was converted by James Outram to become its home. As Wilkinson and Ashley observe with a hint of a lifted eyebrow in The English Buildings Book: ‘a rather sober building became intoxicated in the process.’ The first intake, primarily graduates, entered in 1995.
In 1992 the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences opened on Clarkson Road as the largest mathematical campus in the world. By 1996 Cambridge was home to a thousand companies, employing 35,000 staff. In 1997 billionaire Bill Gates donated £12,000,000 to the university for a new computer laboratory. By 2010 Trinity’s initiative – now known as the Cambridge Science Park – was celebrating its 40th anniversary and its self-proclaimed standing as ‘Europe’s longest-serving and largest centre for commercial research and development’, complete with conference facilities, fitness centre and nursery (www.cambridgesciencepark.co.uk). A complementary website – www.cambridgephenomenon.com – claimed that the city now had 1,000 technology and bio-tech companies, plus 400 further companies providing financial and other support services, collectively employing 40,000 people. Seven miles west of Cambridge, Cambourne was developed as a ‘super village’ from 1999 onwards. By 2011 it was estimated that the daily commuter population of Cambridge had passed the 40,000 mark.
Happy birthday to us
In 2001 Cambridge celebrated the 800th anniversary of its charter and its 50th year as a city. In 2009 the University of Cambridge celebrated the 800th anniversary of its foundation and took the opportunity this offered to launch a world-wide fundraising campaign. By June 2010 this had raised more than a billion pounds, making Cambridge the first ever university outside the USA to raise such a sum – two years ahead of schedule. In the same year Cambridge also became the first non-American university to achieve first place in the World University Rankings. In 2011 it came first again – and also topped the national rankings for student satisfaction.
The Royal Mail marked the university’s landmark 800th birthday by issuing a series of stamps celebrating the achievements of the university’s staff and alumni – William Harvey’s description of the circulation of blood, Newton’s Principia, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, Macaulay’s History of England, Crick and Watson’s discovery of the structure of DNA, the Boat Race, Footlights and the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols – which is where we began.