Route – The Cambridge Placebook

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!

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.)

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.

October 3, 2021January 4, 2022

A Wander along the Thames

London is less than an hour’s express train ride from Cambridge. This has probably given me a bit of a case of “close enough to go anytime so I don’t.” Before the pandemic, I went occasionally to concerts and museums in London, always accompanied by a little wandering. But nothing like proper exploration (let alone top tourist attractions), which I could always do another time. Since the pandemic, repeated national lockdowns and Covid caution have kept me away until the last few months. It’s a shame, because London is like Cambridge on steroids for a place collector like me—nearly infinite nooks and crannies. The clock is ticking and I’m learning not to take London for granted.

The theatre district of the West End of London, comparable to Broadway in New York City, is one place I hadn’t managed to visit. So, recently, when TodayTix alerted me about a sale for West End tickets, I went for it, choosing the musical Come from Away on the next weekend. It also happened to be a weekend I was moving house, but like I said, London is so close you can do an evening or half-day and still get your money’s worth. So, another little wandering glimpse. Without any real plans other than wandering, I took an early afternoon train the day of the play. I had to go to London Liverpool Street Station because the slightly quicker route to Kings Cross Station was disrupted. This was a serendipity, because although it was several miles from the West End, it placed me close enough to the River Thames to do my wandering along the river. I’ve always been drawn to the Thames and its thoroughfares and bridges and waterfront skyline when I visit London—never mind its slight stench. So while the musical and West End were great, my walk along the Thames to get there ended up being an equally vivid highlight.

May 2, 2021July 5, 2021

The Cam Towpath to Bottisham Lock

My favorite way to explore:

Look at Google Maps on satellite mode
Find the green patches
Think about where I haven’t been recently (or ever)
Click around for general cycling directions
Get on my bike
Deviate from that route as much as I like.

On Easter Sunday, a month ago now, my afternoon was wide open after Easter observances and the weather was perfect. So I opened Google Maps and consulted my map feelers—where I felt like being and where I could extend my exploration coverage—and decided on the direction of Jesus Green and Fen Ditton. No endpoint in mind, just a place to be and see where I ended up.

Well, I ended up seven miles down along the River Cam. The pull of the path was irresistible, and only a sense of daylight waning turned me back.

April 11, 2021December 12, 2021

Madingley and Coton: A Country Ramble

So much of Britain is countryside. It still boggles my mind that after millennia of habitation, such a relatively small place could be mostly rural, with a few major urban centers and the rest a network of tiny villages in a sea of fields. Cambridge is balanced rather precariously on the boundary between these worlds. You don’t have to go far in any direction to plunge straight into rural green. It’s also growing fast, destabilizing the long history of tight containment within that green matrix, and unsurprisingly stirring up anxiety among countryside lovers and dwellers. I’m only an observer—but I do number myself among the countryside lovers.

February 28, 2021July 5, 2021

Here Comes the Sun: Jesus Green, Midsummer Common, and the Lower Cam

When the sun comes out in Cambridge, so, of course, do the people. When I wandered out to Jesus Green today to catch some sun myself, I knew it would be busy, but I didn’t realize I was going to soak up people as much as sun. Pandemic lockdown is to human presence as winter is to vitamin D, and sitting at my desk for months has starved me of both. The warmth, the colors, the spread of people in all their shapes, sizes, accents, and energies; people out in the world doing things, talking, relaxing in shared space—is it possible I had started to forget what this is like? Jesus Green began to give this bounty back to me today.

Jesus Green (St John’s College Chapel in skyline)

January 17, 2021July 5, 2021

Grantchester Meadows

When the English poet and Cambridge alumnus Rupert Brooke was homesick and depressed in Germany in 1912, he wrote a nostalgic, light-hearted poem about one of Cambridge’s gems:

. . . would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! —
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
…I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . .

God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England’s the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of THAT district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.

(from “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”)

Brooke proceeds to comically badmouth every other village in the vicinity of Cambridge based entirely on what insults rhyme with their names.[1] It makes an interesting timepiece, to recognize the names of villages that have now been subsumed as neighborhoods of the City of Cambridge (Madingley, Cherry Hinton, Ditton…). Grantchester, however, is one village that has kept its geographical identity, still tiny and discrete on the banks of the River Cam amidst fields and college sports greens. Nevertheless, it is very closely linked with Cambridge, not least by the steady flow of joggers and dog-walkers along the two-mile footpath that runs beside the River Cam from Cambridge to Grantchester. Much more could be said about Grantchester, the village— its medieval church, its pubs, its tearoom, its namesake detective show I got my family hooked on after witnessing its fourth season being filmed in town—but it’s the path to Grantchester I want to write about for now. The path ambles through the idyllic chain of green where Brooke wanted to lie “flower-lulled in sleepy grass”: Grantchester Meadows.

January 3, 2021July 5, 2021

Hobson’s Conduit and Nine Wells

Waterways have an inherent sense of story—they bring elsewhere to you, following a path with a volition beyond your own, and tacitly invite you to find out where from and where to. Here’s one: Hobson’s Conduit, a stream dug in 1610 from chalk springs out in the fields to the heart of Cambridge, still flowing and steeped in city lore. When a retired Cambridge professor told me about the walk along the Conduit’s length from city center to source at Nine Wells Nature Reserve, I tucked the captivating idea away in my to-walk list. Although I inadvertently walked partway on the inviting public footpath once, it took me a while to pick up the trail again.

Boxing Day 2020: gray and brisk but not raining or freezing; paths still muddy and fields flooded after the storm two days before Christmas. Looking for a way to pass an afternoon with a friend on the first day of renewed Covid lockdown, I suggested the walk to Nine Wells.