THEY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT THEY WERE doing, those wandering scholars of yore. Around 1208 an unknown number of clergymen left Oxford for Reading, London, East Anglia — even Paris. An Oxford woman somehow died, one or more scholars were summarily hanged, and many clerks, under the glare of King John, calculated that life may be better spent elsewhere. Perhaps those exiles who took root in Cambridge were en route to the Isle of Ely before finding that, within the gentle curve of the Cam, there were prospects aplenty for a new academic life.
The eight centuries since then have been a tale of ups and downs, riding high in Elizabethan times, and mothballing under George III. Still, by the early nineteenth century, Cambridge had grown little over the preceding half millennium. Unlike moneyed Oxford — Arnold’s “city of dreaming spires” which was to Wilde the “the most beautiful thing in England” — Cambridge could seem to William Morris “rather a hole of a place”, later dubbed by Frederick Raphael “the city of perspiring dreams”.
The arrival of the railway in 1845, and marriage for college fellows in 1882, saw appreciable growth of the city’s footprint. Although it evaded the incursion of large-scale industry in the twentieth century, the push for post-war residential growth was inevitable, and proper. In recent
