Cambridge: Colleges and more

Cambridge fortunately is small enough to be covered in about a day. A bus ride through town, combined with a punting trip down the Cam, is about enough to give you a good idea of what this town’s all about. The must-not-miss sights include (obviously) the many colleges of Cambridge. Although visitors aren’t allowed into colleges per se (except into chapels or a few halls), many colleges are splendid buildings even if just seen from the outside. Some of the best include King’s College, Queen’s College and Trinity. All are very historical.

Other places you’ve got to include in your itinerary are Hobson’s Conduit (not great to look at, but it has an interesting story behind it- more on that further on); the Round Church and the American War Cemetery.

Experiences you can’t afford to miss include a punting trip down the Cam (if you’re really adventurous, you’ll do the hard work yourself!) and buying yourself a pound of delicious fudge from one of the many shops in town. I’d recommend the rum and raisin flavor-it’s gorgeous.

Quick Tips:

Unless you’re keen on exploring every single inch of Cambridge, this town is best visited as a day-tour from London. A train ride of an hour and a half gets you there easily from London, and once you’re in Cambridge, a bus tour is a good way of seeing the town. Whichever way you go about it, make sure you carry an umbrella or a mac- as in much of England, the rain is never far away!

Best Way To Get Around:

A bus tour of Cambridge- Guide Friday is the tour company we went with- is the best way to get around this lovely university town. The Guide Friday buses do hour-long tours through Cambridge, starting every fifteen minutes from Silver Street. They’re hop-on, hop-off tours, and are really convenient, besides being very informative. Other good ways of seeing Cambridge are on foot or bicycle (the latter is really the most appropriate way of making your way around!) The town’s manageably small, so getting around isn’t a problem.

Another great way to see Cambridge is from the river- hire a punt or a boat on the Cam (a punt, if you decide to do your own punting, costs about £10 per hour; if you get a student punter to do the hard work, it costs about £8 per passenger, per hour).

Lunch at the Bloomsbury Restaurant in the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza was part of the Cambridge package tour we’d bought- all three of us were on tight budgets and would probably not have eaten at a posh hotel restaurant otherwise. The Bloomsbury, however, though upmarket, turned out to be an enjoyable and rather warm place-definitely not snooty. The décor’s all in warm tones of brown, gold, and maroon, and huge windows look out onto the street below- the ambience is relaxed without being stuffy.

Coming to the food: the menu’s pretty extensive, with a decent range of no-frills food of the `typically’ English variety. Good, well-loved salads, soups, roasts, pies and the like, all fairly affordable. We had a deliciously flavorful cream of mushroom soup, a roast beef, roast turkey, and a Caesar salad- all well-cooked, hot and delicious- for less than £10 each, including fresh juice and dark chocolate for afterwards.

A comfortable and friendly restaurant- on the whole, a place I’d like to visit again.

The river Cam wends its silvery way down the length of Cambridge, flowing languidly past colleges, commons, lawns, and copses. A relative of mine, who was at Cambridge way back in the ‘50s (or was it the ‘40s?) tells a story of how he, along with a bunch of madcap friends, spent a lazy summer afternoon preparing a large sphere out of cardboard. It was given a rough surface, painted grey, and made to look exactly like one of the stone spheres which dotted the top of a parapet along a bridge next to their college. The men positioned their masterpiece carefully, about halfway between two of the genuine spheres on the parapet, and then made a big show of pushing it over the edge of the parapet into the river below, putting in a lot of effort (or so it would seem to a bystander). Of course, evil minds that they had, they timed this huge farce for when a punt was actually passing below. The occupants of the unlucky punt, hearing all the heaving and panting above them, looked up, and to their horror, discovered these madmen set on shoving this huge stone down on them. They panicked as the sphere fell, and leaped out of the punt on either side, straight into the Cam. Whether the perpetrators of this wild prank stuck around to see the reactions of their victims is something I do not know.

Rest assured, this is not a daily occurrence if you’re going punting. We did, and nobody shoved stones- fake or otherwise- down on us. Three of us- me, my husband and a friend of ours- hired a punt- a neat, comfortable little boat with a flat `stage’ at the end for the punter to stand on- for £10 an hour and spent a most enjoyable 60 minutes exploring the river. (The £10 was for punting ourselves; hiring a student punter to do your punting for you costs about three times that amount).

My husband and our friend took quite some time learning the ropes- punting isn’t as easy as it looks, and the ride out took a helluva long time, with the punt drifting about from bank to bank with gay abandon. Getting used to it takes a while, but after some time we got the hang of it.

The ride's wonderful- the river flowing between grassy banks, with willows drooping low over the water, and the towering, majestic buildings of the colleges further away from the Cam. All along the river are a series of bridges, and our ride took us below six of them, including the famous Mathematical Bridge, a self-supporting wooden structure, constructed without the use of even a single nail, originally said to have been built by either Sir Isaac Newton or one of his students. Nobody seems sure which, though the latter seems more likely.

My top recommendation for seeing Cambridge- especially if you don’t have too much time to go exploring on your own- would be to take a bus tour. The tour we took was with Guide Friday,a company which has since been acquired by City Sightseeing Worldwide. They operate hop-on, hop-off tours which cover all of Cambridge. For an additional sum, they can include transport (by train) to and from London, as well as lunch at the Bloomsbury Restaurant at the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza, Cambridge. Bus tours through Cambridge last one hour in an open-top bus, and start every 15 minutes from Silver Street, with further stops at designated points along the route. Adult tickets (for the bus tour only) cost £7.50; children above 5 years pay £3.

We got into the spacious green bus right outside the railway station. It was a drippy day, so going up on the roof of the bus was out of the question, but the view from inside wasn’t too bad either. The trip took us through the town, past a number of colleges, and around many of the main sights, including Hobson’s Conduit, the Round Church, and the War Cemetery. The tour guide was a motherly and extremely competent lady named Pat, whose commentary, while informative, was lively and immensely interesting. The bus stopped along the way at Silver Street, where we got off and did a bit of exploring on our own before coming back to climb on to the next bus which came along to complete our tour.

Guide Friday tours run all through the year; the first tour of the day begins at 9:30 am and the last at 6 pm, both from Silver Street. More information, including online booking, is available at the City Sightseeing website.

Cambridge (named after the river Cam, which flows through it) was founded in 1209 by students fleeing, along with a few tutors, from Oxford, where a murder had resulted in student uprisings, following which some colleges had been closed. The first college to be founded in Cambridge was Peterhouse , which dates back to 1284. Prior to all this, the town had been an important centre for the Romans and was later a sea port (although it’s actually sixty miles from the sea).

Today, Cambridge has a total of 31 colleges, 28 being co-educational and 3 being women’s colleges. Magdalene College was the last college to change from being men’s-only to co-educational; it did so in the late 1980s, and the men at the college really hated the idea of women joining- the month when women students were allowed was observed as `Black October’, and a regular `Black October’ tie was issued to mark the ill-fated month. Students actually walked around with black arm-bands to mourn the admittance of women.

The university is, of course, the main focus of this pretty, very English town. The departments of the university are spread out all over the town, and students from different colleges pedal their way to their respective departments (students are not allowed to own or use cars; even the members of the royalty use cycles). Colleges and departments, all of them housed in beautiful old buildings, look really as if they belong more in medieval England than in the 21st century- but that’s all part of their charm. The colleges, by the way, have some rather quaint traditions; for instance, a `fellow’ (a senior teacher) at a college may walk on the grass of his or her college only (there are very strict rules regarding the lawns- no student may walk on the grass), but not on that of other colleges. For examinations, students are expected to go formally dressed, though it’s still not as bad as Oxford, where an old pal of ours had to go togged up in a three-piece suit, complete with top hat, to give his exams.

A rather more dubious tradition relates to the 16 pubs which used to line King’s Street once upon a time (now there are only five). All freshmen had to race through each of these 16 pubs, consuming a pint of ale in each. It is said that the record for the fastest sprint through was 19 minutes, though that is as yet unverified. By the end of the race, though, most participants could only crawl back home to their colleges- thus the term `pub crawl’.

The colleges of Cambridge have interesting histories attached to them, too. The first Protestant college, Emmanuel College , listed amongst its students John Harvard (after whom the American university is named). Till today, one Harvard student comes to Cambridge annually on an exchange program to do research, and is accommodated in the rooms which John Harvard occupied.

Jesus College , originally a nunnery, was turned into a college when an official, on a visit to the nunnery, discovered that only two nuns were left- one of whom was very old and the other, as he put it quite discreetly, "was being very naughty". Incidentally, in the good old days, men’s colleges had one problem- the students, usually bachelors, couldn’t be bothered with keeping their rooms clean, or making their beds, so women `bedders’ (similar to chairwomen) were appointed. There were certain necessary qualifications required for the job- you had to be old, married and ugly. There was a committee, too, to vet applicants for the posts. Don’t know if it would be very flattering to get selected!

Sidney Sussex College had, as one of its students, Oliver Cromwell, whose head was later returned to the college and buried in the chapel in 1960.

The largest, and definitely one of the most well-known colleges, is Trinity, which lists among its most illustrious students personages such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Prince Charles, A A Milne and Christopher Robin (incidentally, while we’re on the topic- there’s a lot of Winnie the Pooh memorabilia available in the shops of Cambridge).

Another well-known student of Cambridge was William Pitt the Younger, who introduced income tax (and with that simple little act became the most widely criticized man of all time!)

Colleges are not the only thing there is to Cambridge. Besides academic institutions, there are other places of interest in Cambridge too, and they’re scattered across the town. Among the must-sees are the Round Church (a circular stone church dating back to 1130 and modeled on the Sepulchre in Jerusalem), Parker’s Piece (a flat green `common’ renowned for the fact that this was where the rules of soccer were first worked out), and Hobson’s Conduit , a small tower-like structure that's a monument to the man who arranged to get fresh water to the town. Hobson, incidentally, kept horses for hire and insisted that customers take the horse closest to the door, whether they liked it or not. If you didn’t agree with that, Hobson’s stock reply was, "It’s either my choice, or no choice", and that’s where the term `Hobson’s choice" originated.

Within the town itself is the Cambridge University Press, which dates back to 1521 and is the oldest printing press in the UK. Further out of the town, in the fens, is the American War Cemetery , where 3,000 odd American soldiers killed in WWII are buried. The cemetery itself is very quiet--you stand at the entrance and look out across a vast expanse of green dotted with white crosses. It’s very reminiscent of France, or one of the other major battlefields, rather than a quiet country town in England.