Discover Cambridge

A market town the university grew around

Cambridge existed as a trading post on the River Cam long before it was a seat of learning; the market on Market Hill has traded continuously on the same site since well before 1209, the year scholars fleeing a dispute with the townspeople of Oxford are traditionally said to have settled here. What grew up around that market over the following seven centuries is the thing people now travel to see: 31 independent colleges, each with its own courts, chapel and endowment, loosely federated into one university. Peterhouse, the oldest, was founded in 1284; King's, whose chapel dominates every view of the city centre, in 1441; the newest colleges date from the twentieth century. The Backs, the run of college gardens and lawns along the western bank of the Cam behind King's, Clare, Trinity, St John's and Magdalene, is the single view that explains the whole city: dressed stone and clipped grass giving way to a working river with punts on it.

Cambridge is a working city of around 145,000 people, not a museum piece behind glass. The market square still trades daily, Mill Road east of the station is the city's more mixed, less collegiate high street, and the Cambridge Science Park and the wider 'Silicon Fen' technology cluster, built on spinouts from the university's engineering and computing departments, employ far more people than the colleges do. Term-time brings roughly 25,000 students back to the bicycles and the punts; outside term, in the long vacation from July to September and over Christmas, the city empties out and slows down, and the same streets that are elbow-to-elbow with tour groups in May feel almost provincial in January.