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.
