Bridge on the River Cam

We have often walked down this street before

So, after a good bit of galavanting about the continent, we finally came to Cambridge (our fair city), where we would be actually living for the year. I've been contemplating how to write about Cambridge, since my initial impression of it was shaped by the fact that I knew I would be living there, and my impressions since have a depth lacking in my short visits to other places. Cambridge has a large amount of history behind it, and I've been able to take lots of it in and select the parts that appeal to me most. Because of this, I've decided that I'll just do a series of posts about aspects of Cambridge that stand out to me, and try to leave behind the nutshell-reduction approach that I've used for everywhere else.

Cambridge is located is located about an hour's train-ride north of London, in the middle of a swamp that is affectionately known as the Fens. The city has basically no natural resources in itself - everything it has needed has been imported over the centuries. Though the city is often compared to "the other" English University city (Oxford, though we prefer not to speak the name here), Cambridge does not even have its own rock quarry, which has made its architecture much more varied over the years, while Oxford's building style is much more uniform.

The brick- heavy front gate of St. John's College

While the University of Oxford predates the city of the same name, Cambridge existed as a city before the university came about. The university traces its roots to an incident in 1209, when a dispute at Oxford threatened to bring about scrutiny from the monarchy, and a group of scholars decided to make for the market town of Cambridge to lay low for a while. However, like most
scholars who try to get out of academia, they found that they possessed no useful skills, and soon took up teaching again.

Though the first college was not founded for another 20 years, Cambridge University has been recognizing 1209 as the official founding date of the university, mostly because it gave them a great excuse to undertake an 800th anniversary fundraising campaign throughout 2009. In 20 years, they may change their minds to celebrate another 800th anniversary, depending on their financial situation.

The bonfire on Guy Fawkes' Day

The university currently consists of 31 independent colleges, which are residential bodies responsible for housing, socialization, and one-on-one tutoring of their students. For most of the university's existence, the colleges held supreme power over the actual education that went on at the university. However, in the 20th century, as Cambridge's scientific prowess created a need for expensive laboratories which individual colleges could not afford, the university's departments gained more power through the construction of such facilities, which the colleges shared between them. Older facilities, such as dining halls or playing fields, are still owned by individual colleges.

Though Cambridge was a younger university than Oxford, it proved adept at gaining royal patronage, which can be seen by such marvels as the famous King's College Chapel, built by Henry VI-Henry VIII, and the fact that HRH Prince Phillip is the symbolic chancelor of the university to this day.

King's College Chapel - excellent, er...rib vaulting

Many of the oldest and richest colleges are located along the river Cam, possessing green space next to it which is collectively known as "The Backs." The quintissential Cambridge experience is to going punting down the Cam through the backs, looking at the architecture of the old colleges and feeling inconsequential in the scope of history. Punting, by the by, is not a football (or even rugby) term, but rather an idiosyncracy of English cities on shallow rivers, whereby people get in flat-bottomed boats called punts, and propel themselves by sticking a long pole into the bottom of the river and pushing themselves along.

If you're less interested in the history of Cambridge than interesting stories, a fun passtime is to simply wait on one of the bridges over the Cam and listen to the profession punt tour guides. While there are some things along the Cam that it's generally agreed that there are certain things along the Backs that have interesting stories about them, there is virtually no consensus about what those stories actually are. For instance, the Clare College bridge contains a stone ball that is missing a wedge. Apparently, this is a boring stretch of the river, because every single tour guide has a different take on what this means - some will say there was a tax to pay on fully completed bridges, others will say that the builder wasn't paid and sabotaged the bridge out of vengeance.

The mathematical bridge, nails and all

When you pass another bridge in Queen's College, known as the mathematical bridge, some guides will try to persuade you that Newton himself, in the midst of a metal shortage, constructed the bridge out of wood without any nails, despite the fact that nothing about Newton would lead you to believe him to be an exceptional bridge engineer. If you brought up the fact that the bridge obviously contains nails now, they would tell you that it later needed repairs and was disassembled, but no one could figure out how to put it together again without using nails. It combines a ridiculous unprovable assertion with a deity-like glorification of a Cambridge icon - everything you need for a good punt story. The truth is that most of these stories are lost in history; things are the way they are because they've always been that way (we haven't even started using oars, for crying out loud!). If you enjoy romanticized versions of history, stop by sometime and I will punt you up and down the river with even more ridiculous stories than these.

Or maybe I'll just keep posting them here.