 Punting on the Cam behind King's College/ Sidney Sussex College |
 by Philip Game
Whilst the British may disparage ‘Oxbridge’ as the home of an ivory tower elite, England’s two venerable university cities are quite different places.
Oxford is a busy industrial city which happens to incorporate an historic university: this is where the Morris motor company started out. Oxford is the gateway to the Cotswolds and England’s verdant West Country, but beyond Cambridge, 90 kilometres north of London, lie only the marshy Fens of East Anglia, an austere and sparsely populated landscape.
Cambridge exists only as a seat of learning. Without its colleges the town would have remained at best a sleepy provincial burg like the cathedral ‘city’ of Ely, further north.
Punting on the Cam; the Gothic tracery of King's College Chapel… these are images of an ethereal England far removed from the twenty-first century. Indeed, cattle graze 500 metres from the market square. As one pundit remarked, “the city of Cambridge… lies like a cat in a basket, its back curled against the comfortable curve of the river… occasionally stretching indolently on the lawn”.
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