1 - Townscape and university: topographical change

Summary

THE SETTING

Beneath surface changes, the centre of Cambridge is still dominated by two roads which have been in use for at least 1,000 years, bringing traffic from London and Colchester respectively. These routes, Trumpington and Trinity Streets to the west and Regent and Sidney Streets to the east, rest on the terraces of gravel beds marking an ancient river valley; they were the driest ways to the river crossing below Castle Hill. The medieval settlement with its houses, churches, and monasteries grew along these streets and between the line of Trumpington Street and the river; here the wharves and warehouses of the inland port were constructed, along Milne Street and Salthythlane. This first Cambridge was transformed from the fourteenth century onwards. The commercial quarter was swept away to make room for university colleges, and when in the sixteenth century the monasteries were dissolved their sites too were taken over for new collegiate foundations, a process that concluded in 1596 with the planting of Sidney Sussex where the house of the Franciscan friars had stood.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Cambridge expanded little outside its Elizabethan limits. Hamond's town plan (1592) shows development up to Mount Pleasant in the Huntingdon Road, and Custance's (1798) the same. In Trumpington Street building reached the present line of Fitzwilliam Street and the museum by 1600, and crept down by 1800 to Spital End, opposite the entrance to today's Engineering Department.