Taking a punt

I’m not generally one for “what I did on my holidays” posts, but last week I spent a few days in Cambridge, which I thought would be worthy of a mention. The last time I was there was actually the week in 1997 following the death of Princess Diana, when there was a very strange atmosphere in the country. One thing that struck me this year was the amount of new construction of five- and six-storey buildings that had taken place, especially in the vicinity of the station.

Contrary to popular belief, my objective on holiday is mainly to visit places of historic interest rather than engaging on a non-stop pub crawl. I managed to get to Anglesey Abbey, which stands in beautiful grounds and was restored in the inter-war period by the wealthy Lord Fairhaven as a beau-ideal of the English country house:

The Imperial War Museum Aviation Collection at Duxford – even a full day can’t do this justice.

And Audley End. This is a palatial Jacobean house originally built by the Earl of Suffolk that, despite its current size, was in the early 1700s drastically reduced from its original huge extent. It even had a brief spell in the ownership of King Charles II in the 1660s. Unusually for such properties, it is in the hands of English Heritage rather than the National Trust, which results in a somewhat less cloying and patronising approach to presentation.

However, despite this, it’s impossible to avoid the opportunities for a bit of pub exploration that a trip away provides. On the Monday afternoon, I had a wander round some of the pubs on the eastern fringe of the city centre with Martin Taylor and Andrew from West Suffolk CAMRA, covering the Alexandra, Free Press, Elm Tree and Champion of the Thames (pictured at the top). Martin has written about this perambulation here and here.

All were good, but the Free Press and Champion are absolute classic unspoilt pubs, and both in fact Greene King tied houses. The Free Press had the rare Greene King XX Mild (which was superb) and a tiny box snug that was crowded with three of us in it. However, I probably marginally preferred the Champion, which is closer to the city centre and has more of a passing-trade clientele, Indeed I went back there the following night, when I overheard some classic pub banter:

Boycott was a boring batsman who turned into a stimulating commentator. Botham was the opposite...

British actor who has just landed a top role in a US TV series being interviewed on breakfast TV. “You must have beaten off a lot of American actors to get that part.”

Both of those, though, are very much middle-class pubs. The Champion shows the rugby on the telly, but not the footie. I have no problem with that but, apart from Wetherspoon’s, there really are no down-to-earth boozers left in central Cambridge, and Martin reports that the traditional estate pubs have also died the death on the outskirts. There is no Cambridge equivalent to Oxford’s Blackbird Leys and Cowley car factory. The lack of older customers in the pubs was also noticeable.

What Cambridge does have is the Mill Road area on the southeast of the city centre, which encompasses the two districts of Petersfield and Romsey Town on either side of the railway line. It is an area of Victorian terraced housing that is now occupied by young professional workers in education, healthcare and high-tech industries, and you could probably buy a whole street in Burnley for the price of a single house. The demographic is maybe similar to Cholrton in Manchester.

However, it has retained its small back-street locals, and the character of the local population is reflected in the clientele of pubs such as the Six Bells, Live and Let Live and Cambridge Blue, resulting in an atmosphere rare anywhere else in the country. You wouldn’t find any small suburban pub around here anywhere near as busy as the Six Bells at 8.30 pm on a Wednesday night, or with such a youthful customer profile. The Wikipedia article recounts that Dylan Thomas attended a notorious week-long drunken party in the Mill Road area in 1937 after coming to Cambridge to give a reading.

Despite the title, I spurned the offer of a trip in a punt on the Cam, but I did overhear one of the punters informing his passengers that Cambridge alumni had won 117 Nobel Prizes to Oxford’s 69. On the other hand, Cambridge has only produced 14 British Prime Ministers to Oxford’s 28. I suppose those statistics reflect rather better on Cambridge. Both are fascinating and characterful cities, but I don’t really have a preference between the two.

As an aside, Cambridge was the last major town or city in Britain to have a “one-sided” railway station, where all trains in either direction used the same very long through platform. I remember this from the late 70s and early 80s, and Wikipedia reports that it continued in that form until as late as 2011.