Cambridge: A Guide to Britain's River City of Colleges

From Roman ford to university town

Cambridge sits where a prehistoric trackway once crossed the River Cam, a spot the Romans fortified as a river-crossing garrison in the first century AD. The settlement that grew around it stayed a modest market town for a thousand years, trading wool and grain along the waterway that gives the city its name. Its real transformation began in 1209, when a group of scholars left Oxford after a dispute with townspeople and settled on the banks of the Cam. Within decades a formal university had taken shape, and by the fourteenth century Cambridge had become one of only two university towns in England, a status it has never relinquished.

The individual colleges came later and are, in effect, separate charitable foundations that predate the university's modern administrative structure. Peterhouse, founded in 1284, is the oldest; King's College, founded by Henry VI in 1441, is the most architecturally famous. Today the University of Cambridge comprises 31 constituent colleges and around 145,000 residents call the wider city home, a population that swells noticeably during term time.

King's College Chapel and the architecture of learning

No building captures Cambridge's identity better than King's College Chapel, built between 1446 and 1515 in the late Perpendicular Gothic style. Its fan-vaulted ceiling is the largest of its kind anywhere in the world, a stone lattice that seems to defy the weight it carries, and its stained glass survived the Reformation and the Civil War largely intact. The chapel's choir, made up of choristers and choral scholars, sings a candlelit service of nine lessons and carols each Christmas Eve that is broadcast by the BBC and has been imitated by churches worldwide since the tradition began in 1918.

Behind the grand facades of King's, Trinity and St John's runs a gentler landscape: The Backs, the green riverside gardens that lie behind the principal colleges. Punting along this stretch of the Cam, propelling a flat-bottomed boat with a long pole, has been a Cambridge pastime since Edwardian students first took it up, and it remains the best way to see the Mathematical Bridge and the Bridge of Sighs from water level.

Museums, science and student life

Cambridge's academic weight extends well beyond its chapels. The Fitzwilliam Museum, one of Britain's oldest public art museums, holds Egyptian antiquities, Old Master paintings and an outstanding coin collection, all free to enter. The university's scientific legacy is just as deep: the Cavendish Laboratory produced 30 Nobel laureates in physics, including J.J. Thomson, who discovered the electron there in 1897, and Watson and Crick, who worked out the structure of DNA a few streets away in 1953. That heritage is visible today in Cambridge's status as the anchor of Europe's densest technology cluster, often nicknamed 'Silicon Fen'.

Term-time Cambridge has a rhythm all its own, driven by bicycles, formal hall dinners and May Week celebrations that, confusingly, happen in June. Market Square has traded continuously since the 1200s and remains the best spot for a cheap lunch between sightseeing stops.

Planning a visit

Cambridge is roughly 45 minutes from London by direct train, making it an easy day trip, though most visitors find a night or two lets them see more than one or two colleges properly. Spring, particularly May and June, brings crocuses along The Backs and the tail end of the academic year; September and October offer a quieter city with the drama of a new term about to begin. Chapel visiting hours shrink sharply during May and June exam periods, so it is worth checking individual college websites before planning a route. Free evensong services, held on most weekday evenings in term time, are an underused way to hear the choir without paying the day admission fee.