Real Cambridge

Cambridge, ancient academic centre and fenland community, science/tech centre and centre of radical religious and political thinking, home to grand museums and agricultural cottages. With an American war cemetery, folk festival, iron age fort, evensong and Reality Checkpoint, it is a place alone as former student Grahame Davies finds on his return.

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Cambridge: the right brain of Oxbridge, the composite capital city of Clever. For eight centuries, this quiet English seat of learning has been one half of history’s longest-running academic arms race. When it comes to stockpiling Nobel Prizes, only that Ivy League newcomer, Harvard, has more.

This is the mater of all alma maters, with the kind of A-list alumni – Newton, Cromwell, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Darwin and Hawking – so famous they don’t even need first names. This is the city where Wittgenstein split hairs and where Rutherford split the atom; where Watson and Crick discovered the DNA that shapes the human body, and where generations of students push those bodies to their limits.

But behind the picture-postcard image of punts, Pimms and polymaths, is another Cambridge: the working East Anglian fenland community that gave us Pink Floyd, Association Football, the Society for Psychical Research, the Cambridge Folk Festival, the Reality Checkpoint – and the graffiti protestor who sprayed his messages in Latin…

Poet and psychogeographer Grahame Davies explores both Cambridges: the world city and the workplace, the glamorous and the gritty; the famous and the forgotten. He discovers there’s always more to discover about this extraordinary city – no matter how clever you are.