Four years after I arrived in Cambridge, I’ve reached a major milestone: I submitted my PhD thesis, and just today, passed the viva (thesis defense, from viva voce, oral exam in the obligatory Latin–and no the exam isn’t in Latin)! I still have more work ahead on publishing the chapters, so I’ll be hanging around a few more months with much the same routine. But given this milestone, I thought it would be good time to resurrect a blog post I started writing in 2019 about the two places where I spent most of my PhD time (that is, outside of pandemic lockdowns).
The day-to-day routine of a PhD student is often fluid, and has only become more so during the pandemic. Before, I went in every day to the office desk I was assigned in the David Attenborough Building (DAB) in the city-centre New Museums Site, or else to the lab in the Plant Sciences Department across the street in the Downing Site. Then, for almost two years, I worked exclusively from my laptop and borrowed second monitor in my bedroom. Over the last few terms, I gradually transitioned back to my old office haunts as my colleagues also repopulated the desks. After only a few visits, once again tromping up and down the six flights of stairs and through the many sets of glass doors emblazoned with frosted swifts up to the familiar DAB tower office with its view of carparks, spires, and sunsets, it felt like I had never left.
When I started writing the first version of this post, I was still in the throes of lab work, sequencing DNA from hebe leaves. I was just as familiar, then, with the genteel but musty Edwardian halls of the Plant Sciences Department as I was with the recently refurbished campus of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) where the Ecology groups are given space for deskwork, hence my DAB desk. And hence, the title of this post. I spend less time in the Department now, but it’s still the twin to my workspace, where I go for department seminars and lunch meetups out in the grassy courtyard.
So what are these Sites? As explained in my Cambridge Primer, there is no central campus for the University of Cambridge. Instead, Department facilities are clustered throughout the city in various named Sites like the Downing Site (on Downing Street, near Downing College), which is home to ten departments and various museums and laboratories, and the New Museums Site, with six departments, more museums, and the CCI campus, where my university colleagues work alongside various conservation charities and NGOs.
In July 2019, I started sketching out the New Museums Site:
“I’m currently sitting in the pavilion area outside the Whale Café, an establishment on the ground level of the David Attenborough Building and adjoining the Zoology Museum, which has 50-metre whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling and displayed behind floor-to-ceiling windows (apparently it used to be open to the elements). It’s not the nicest place to sit, as the New Museums Site can be described as, in the words of one professor I know, canyons of concrete. There’s a labyrinth of brick and stone crowded onto the site, old buildings severed from demolished counterparts and new buildings pushing up like saplings in an overcrowded forest (pardon the mixed metaphors). The David Attenborough Building is at least 50 or 60 years old[1] and is mostly concrete, with blocky modernist architecture and bronzey siding. It wasn’t always the David Attenborough Building: a few years ago it became the home of the CCI, was christened in large letters on the bronzey siding, was completely refurbished inside, and given a towering living wall in the central four-story atrium with a David Attenborough quote in vinyl beneath it (“There is nothing more important than the work you’re doing here today”). David Attenborough rappelled (abseiled) down that living wall when the building opened.
It’s the first building you see when you come in through the archway from Downing Street, and it’s the one I cycle to daily to do the deskwork side of my research, high in one of the abutting ‘towers’ tacked on rather like turrets, up 6 flights of stairs.
“Another reason why this isn’t the best place to sit in the evening is that there are loud, shrill recordings of swift calls being broadcast from the very tower where I work during the day, as a conservation effort by one of the groups in CCI, to attract nesting swifts to their swift boxes. It has only succeeded in sparking a minor war between the PhD students and postdocs working in my office and the swift conservationists, who agreed to only play it outside of business hours.”
A few minutes after I wrote those words three years ago, as I was looking across the site to describe the buildings glowing with traces of sunset, I realized with a thrill that there were live swifts slicing through the window of sky above them. I’ve been avidly following the progress of the DAB swifts ever since, which you can read about in my last post.
The tower is also a good place for looking pensively out over Cambridge whenever you’re stuck on an analysis or bored silly of writing your manuscript. There are people loitering and walking and cycling down Corn Exchange Street; once I glimpsed three people passing by on penny-farthing bikes of various proportions. There are coaches unloading for the night’s Corn Exchange performance. There are flocks of pigeons wheeling and turning over the striped awnings of the market square, fluttering white and angling dark, scooping out tangled channels in the air and rounded corners of the sky, catching the invisible streams headlong, bunching and scattering from the peaks of Cambridge edifices, before the faces of medieval chapel battlements basking burnished beige in winter golden hour. St John’s College Chapel, Great St Mary’s Church. Later, bronzed neon pink glancing off the window frame clues me in to a cloud-rilled molten sherbet sky behind the spires of King’s College Chapel which poke up beyond the bulk of the David Attenborough Building. Pigeons perch on the railings of the weedy green roof or peck around under the solar panels.
With the windows open, we draw the sounds of the city to us. Drills, car alarms from the multi-story carpark, arguments, tantrums, drunkenness, columns of chattering uniformed schoolchildren. Before the pandemic, on Fridays I often heard the calmly blended aural texture of traffic and scattered conversations nudging into something more, the faintest suggestion of rhythm rising out of ambience, which would take more and more definite form as a chant—what do we want, climate justice, when do we want it, now—voices braided together and flowing along Pembroke Street. I joined once or twice.
When the wind blows, it breaks around us like surf, screeching along metal surfaces somewhere on the roof like an aeolian harp, or an otherworldly, atonal piccolo.
Downstairs, the DAB is primed for networking. Each wing of the building belongs to a particular conservation charity. On every floor there are conference rooms named after conservationsists (Jane Goodall, Berta Caceres) or endangered species (Pangolin, Baobab). There are shared “tea points” for water cooler conversations, and a common room with free coffee machines and weekly Cake and Coffee mixers. There are rotating conservation-themed art installations, a CCI conservation book club, a CCI choir, and CCI rounders on Fridays. I could stop by the Zoology Museum whenever I fancy (though suprisingly I hardly ever do). David Attenborough sometimes shows up in the flesh–he could be in the Gecko conference room while you eat lunch on the couch outside, and wave vaguely in your direction when he comes out (my one interaction with him). It’s a nice place to work.
Because I always went straight from the bike cage up the stairs, I didn’t realize until the end of my first year, when Google Maps directed me to take a winding shortcut through the site, that there was much more to the New Museums site than meets the eye. I had noticed the strangely appealing gritty aesthetic of the patchwork of buildings just down the side canyon closest to the DAB entrance: several different shades of brick walls, a mess of bulbous pipes crawling over the top and sides of one and draped in netting, and at the terminus of the view, three blue doors stacked straight up the side of the building, linked by a spindly black spiral staircase. Above those is a covered walkway jutting at highly oblique angle to hook up to the neighboring almost kitty-corner building. But I had figured all that was a dead end.
In fact, there are more of these strange patchwork buildings with narrow pathways between them, and when I realized this, the nooks and crannies had just as much intriguing come-hither as the bends of unfamiliar woodland paths. There’s a red brick tunnel leading to a wrought iron gate onto Pembroke Street and bright turquoise doors labelled (erstwhile) “Store Room” and “Porter’s Lodge” in fancy stone lettering; double back and there’s a winding path around dark-stained brick corners and past windows full of florescent light, desk chairs, water coolers, library stacks; there’s an alligator carved into the curving cream brick of the Mond Building; there are tall brown-brick walls still crusted with the raw cracked plaster of once-rooms scraped from existence, and spiffy new courtyard paving stones below; there’s the big wooden door to the Cavendish Lab entrance to the site, outside of which is a prominent carved plaque commemorating James Clerk Maxwell’s discovery of electromagnetic radiation; only inside the site tucked into a corner is another plaque about the discovery of the structure of DNA.
And somewhere beneath all of this concrete is the ghost of the original Cambridge Botanic Garden, planted here in the 1760s and moved to its current site in 1846 (featured here).
I don’t know what other centuries of ghosts are sleeping beneath that.
Stay tuned for Part II, Downing Site, just down the road.
[1] In fact it was built in 1971 as the Arup Building, designed by the same architect, Philip Dowson, who designed the Snape Maltings Concert Hall I visited in my Suffolk post.
Thank you sharing your experiences and impressions. So well expressed. I looked back at your Cambridge primer for references to Trinity College. We just did a concert of entirely Ralph Vaughn Williams music. Seeing his Cambridge connection caught my attention.
Thanks for that great description of the environs of your academic life. As helpful as the words were, the pictures were indispensable in proving out the hodge-podge atmosphere of the place. My favorite was the erratic on the edge of a rooftop—my kind of joke!