My interest in Cambridge pubs was piqued in 2018, when I worked on a music/local history project at St Matthew’s Primary School, Cambridge. The project was inspired by the re-interment of some Victorian skeletons discovered under the playground during building work; as well as leading the music project for the school, I undertook some background historical research of the area, and became more and more interested in its pubs – of which there was one for every 40 metres of street.
I expected a substantial body of literature about the pubs and inns of Cambridge, but found that there was very little, either in print or online. This was in marked contrast to, say, London, Oxford, and Hull. Local villages – Histon, Impington & Cottenham – all have books about their historic pubs – but not Cambridge.
There are two excellent websites that list existing and lost pubs – Pub wiki, and the Lost Pubs Project but the largest number of pubs listed on either of these sites 400. At the time of writing (May 2020), my list stands at 670. The closest thing we have to a book about Cambridge pubs, although only the remaining 100-or-so, is the excellent blog Pints and Pubs – from Beer to Eternity.
So, I decided to research and record the history of Cambridge pubs. When I made this rash commitment, I was sitting in a pub. Clutching my pint of Oakham’s Citra, I had a revelation – that everything we associate with Cambridge started in a pub (or inn). ‘Silicon Fen’ grew partly out of the work of the Xen project, born in the Castle Inn (Castle St). Down the road at the Baron of Beef (Bridge St), Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry were in violent discussion about Acorn Computers. Francis Crick and James Watson chose the Eagle (Bene’t St) to announce their discovery of DNA; but before that, Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher sketched out the ‘rhesus positive trait’ on a piece of beer-stained piece of paper in the Bun Shop (St. Andrew’s Hill), and the ‘Panton Principles’, recommendations about how science should be published, took the name of the Panton Arms in which they were conceived.
It is perhaps little surprise that Samuel Pepys was a regular at the Three Tuns, Falcon Inn, Rose Inn and The Bear; more recently, another literary toper, Kingsley Amis, gave supervisions at the Merton Arms and the Little Rose.
The Black Bear (Market Passage) was Cambridge’s first concert hall; it was also where Oliver Cromwell organised the Parliamentarians during the 1640s.
The Cambridge Union first met in the Red Lion, and all Cambridge Colleges developed from hostels and inns.
Cosimo de’ Medici, Elizabeth 1, the Maharaja of Nawanagar, Charles I, Wittgenstein, Tolkien, Darwin, King Farouk, Dickens, and the entire Yeomen of the Guard – all passed through Cambridge pubs. Byron kept his pet bear in one, Thomas Cranmer kept a mistress and Trinity College kept a whole pack of dogs in another.
The inns and pubs of Cambridge have had national significance and deserve an in-depth study, one which will help historians of other subjects. This is just a beginning.