Cambridge and environs – The Cambridge Placebook

July 3, 2023July 10, 2023

Graduating from Cambridge: The Senate House

In April, I officially graduated from the University of Cambridge. High time for a post on where it happened.

The University of Cambridge, like any long-evolving entity, is a labyrinth of vestigial traditions: customs that have shaped the life of the place, but have shrunk over time until only ceremony is left. Perhaps nothing is more emblematic of this than the Senate House. This neoclassical 18^th century building at the heart of the city was for 200 years the meeting place for the University Senate, the then-governing body of the University. Alumni became members of the Senate on receiving their Master of Arts (MA). The MA was already vestigial by the 1700s: a status bequeathed 6 years after matriculating as a BA, rather than a degree as you would normally think of one (more on this later). Cambridge MAs in the Senate could vote on anything from whether to continue requiring Greek exams, to whether to grant women degrees and membership in the University. The latter was voted down twice by the all-male Senate, in 1897 and in 1921, and not granted until 1948, after the Senate had been made vestigial. Now, the only thing of consequence the Senate votes on is the appointment of the University Chancellor.

The 1897 Senate vote on granting women Cambridge degrees (the Nays had it)

March 2, 2023February 22, 2023

Lived-in Beauty: Kettle’s Yard

Imagine being confident enough in the aesthetic value of your own domestic whimsy that you display your house for the world in perpetuity. This is what Jim Ede, art collector and friend to artists, did when he bequeathed his Cambridge house and its contents—dubbed Kettle’s Yard—to the University in 1966. He requested that every piece of modern art, every stone and seedpod, every quotidian artifact remain as it was when he was living there. He and his wife Helen even continued to live there while displaying their house for another seven years, continuing a longer tradition of open houses for students and Cambridge residents—a gentle, informal introduction to modern art and a way of life.

February 16, 2023February 16, 2023

Dinky Doors

Some of Cambridge’s most charming architecture is tucked away at ankle level. Since 2019, an anonymous couple has been working toward their mission of “Saving the World” by installing little portals to whimsical delight throughout Cambridge. These are the Dinky Doors. There are 14 so far—new ones pop up every few months—and I always make sure to point out a few of them on tours I give to visitors, or even to friends who have lived here a while and still haven’t noticed them. I must admit that I hadn’t made an effort to track down all of them until I was about to move away (and even then I missed one)!

A tour of all the Dinky Doors is effectively a tour of Cambridge—you can even buy a walking tour from the Dinky Doors website (and/or donate to support their mission to Save the World). There’s also a Youtube channel where the Dinky Doors couple appear (with red boxes on their heads) to update the world on dispatches from the Supreme Leader (a kindly extraterrestrial being giving Dinky Doors instructions on how to Save the World) and otherwise share their quirky humor and Dinky Door backstories. Read on for some highlights!

October 26, 2022February 22, 2023

A Tale of Two Sites: Part I, New Museums Site

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.

August 2, 2022February 22, 2023

The Swifts of the David Attenborough Building

Every summer in early May, bird-minded Brits start looking for the swifts. The birds come screaming up from Africa and southern Europe like arrows, filling the sky with a fantasy of speed. They’re here for just a few months to return to their mates and their nests and breed, the only time of year their little stubby feet will touch down. Their nests are high up—once on cliffs, now more likely in the eaves of buildings—so they can drop easily down into the air on their foraging trips for drifting nest-makings and insects and spiderlings.

For someone from the western U.S., Europe’s common swifts (Apus apus) are a treat. Before, I had only seen one other species of swift, the white-throated, a few times, slicing high around a remote cliff face—nothing like the daily sightings of acrobatic squadrons in the sky above my house in Cambridge. Learning about their yearly sojourns and heroic feats of continuous flying endeared them to me even more. And the David Attenborough Building swift nest boxes clinched the deal.

June 22, 2022June 23, 2022

A Cycle to Ely

Ely: a one-time swamp island, provisioner of freshwater eels, haven for malaria, seat of a Bishop and a cathedral. Between Ely and Cambridge: a river confluence, one or two single-road villages, miles of fen-turned-farmland, a sightline from the Gog Magog hills to the cathedral, a railway line, and a National Cycle Network route. A few months ago a few friends and I with a shared sense of bucket list found a semi-sunny Saturday to do the cycle to Ely. This would be the longest route I’d ever cycled. (Not so for one friend, Amelia, an avid cyclist-explorer who just the weekend before went on a multi-day cycle trip in Wales.)

April 12, 2022April 13, 2022

Cambridge in Books

I got an email from the University a few months ago advertisting a book-collecting contest put on by the University Library Special Collections people. I didn’t take it very seriously at first because although I have indeed collected a lot of books since coming to Cambridge, they seemed a bit too much of a hodge-podge to count as a Collection-with-a-capital-C. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much the books I’d accumulated reflected my curiousity about the British landscape, and especially Cambridge. In any case, I loved them–that should count for something, right? So I proceeded to document the accumulation and spin up a little essay (partly from past blog posts) to submit. Inspired, I even bought a few more books…

As it turned out, my collection WAS too hodge-podge to make a big enough impression on the judging panel, who commended my enthusiasm but thought it might be “a little broad,” and didn’t advance it to the shortlist. Ah well, I had fun with it. And I thought I’d share it here. Read on for the essay followed by a descriptive bibliography of the books crammed into my college-issued bookshelf. (Will I actually expand my collection as aspired to in the essay? Well…stay tuned…)

Some of the books in my Cambridge/nature/guidebook collection

March 1, 2022March 2, 2022

The Road to Longstanton

I have an elderly friend from church who I’ll call M. We bonded over classical music soon after I moved in, and our friendship was sealed when she invited me to come with her to hear Joshua Bell play in Wigmore Hall, her favorite concert venue in London. After the pandemic had kept me away for some time, she asked me to come visit her. She lives alone in a sunny semi-detached house in Longstanton, one of the many medieval villages orbiting Cambridge. Visiting her would entail a long cycle or a longer bus ride; I didn’t hesitate to choose the cycle route, not least for its tour of the countryside northwest of Cambridge. I’ve visited her several times now, thoroughly enjoying the ride, her company, and the stories gleaned from both.

January 4, 2022January 5, 2022

Byron’s Pool

Of all the romantically named Cambridge haunts, Byron’s Pool may be near the top of the list. I don’t particularly enjoy what I’ve read of Lord Byron’s high-flown poetry (except for the satire), and I don’t find the Romantic hero-personality of extremes and debauchery and drama particularly appealing—but I was as beguiled as anyone by the idea of a grove along the River Cam where the famous poet was supposed to have swum while an undergraduate at Trinity (this is what all the guidebooks and interpretive signs say, and not much more). It’s so very Cambridge. Most significantly for my interests, it’s farther up the River Cam than I’ve ever visited.

December 5, 2021January 4, 2022

Autumn Again

I was taking a retrospective look at my blog recently, and was stunned by how much I wrote last autumn. I kept a treasure trove of field notes on everything the season was giving me during a time of quiet and isolation. This season, the hustle of community is back, along with the haze of attempting to write up my thesis, and I’ve found it hard to get into the headspace of word-crafting my surroundings. Despite this, the season has given richly and I’ve been fed by warm earthy palettes, frosty mornings, flame and lemon leaves, full moons, mushrooms and chestnuts, sunbeams and sunsets. In lieu of words I’ve captured as much as I can on my often inadequate camera. I’m going to attempt to decorate the images with some remembered notes, because this autumn deserves all the attention I can give it, even in memory.