Pacing Cambridge.

I spent last weekend pacing around Cambridge. Why aren’t more places like it? Maybe not enough brain-boxes to go around.

It’s a beautiful, charming, densely packed city with narrow streets, squares, a river with punters and thirty-one colleges. Like many of our best cities (York, Edinburgh, Durham, and Bath), Cambridge is just the sort of place you’d think we’d want to replicate. These are the places we go for day trips. These are the places international tourists visit.

Yes, the history, the University, and the culture bring people to these cities. But the charm, the network of little streets, trees, rivers, views and vistas, and the architecture attract people.

However, I must report that Cambridge has ‘unacceptable living conditions’. Yes, that’s right. A city where property values hit £10,000 per sq metre is unacceptable for you to live in. Hampstead in north London, where values are double that, is also a no-go zone. These places are insanely expensive, which is equally as daft, but it is a measure of demand, and it leads me to think people find them agreeable places to live.

Here’s more bad news: The walled cities of Avignon, Carcassonne, and St Malo are also unacceptable. Why, I hear you ask?

The buildings, or more precisely, the windows, are too close together. The problem is that you might see someone through their window from yours—shock, horror.

The chief concern is privacy. Of course, that’s important, but the very nature of a historic city is a certain lack of it. The rules of a spacious suburban dream shouldn’t be applied here. And it’s worth noting that glass in a window is subject to reflection and light—it’s not completely transparent.

The subject of windows and privacy has come up because I’ve designed a house with a window too close to another, which was deemed ‘unacceptable’. This is despite every other adjacent house and flat having similar arrangements.

Most local planning authorities have policies that mean the distance between houses needs to be around 25 metres (paces). There is more to it than I can go into here, so some simplification to justify a mini-rant is present. However, it is impossible to meet these requirements when working in an urban environment, particularly with small infill developments. So, rather than looking at a place and understanding its character, the answer is ‘No, does not compute’ (read in robot tone).

So, with this in mind, I spent some time measuring the widths of the streets in Cambridge by counting my steps. Most of the streets range from five to fourteen paces. The lovely square in Pembroke College is thirty-three by forty-nine. The composition of streets and squares of different widths and heights makes the place. As with everything in life, uniformity sucks.

Welcome to the world of Town Planning, a world where uniformity rules and common sense goes out the window. For nearly eighty years, ‘planning’ has strived to control development and improve places. It has royally failed. Give me one post-war town that beats the historic centres of all the above places.

Urhhh… that’s right, none. Instead, these Modernist, controlling ideals (largely invented by architects) mashed into pages of policy and bureaucracy have given us Swindon, Slough, and Basingstoke.

When submitting a planning application and to play the ‘planning game’, architects must produce a character appraisal of the site and surrounding area. This is done to justify and communicate the proposed design. My quick and short stab at Cambridge is as follows:

Cambridge is characterised by its historic university, medieval colleges, and an eclectic blend of architectural styles spanning centuries. The city’s core is defined by a network of narrow, winding streets and historic courtyards, juxtaposed with open green spaces like Parker’s Piece and the Backs, which offer vistas of the iconic collegiate architecture. The city’s urban fabric promotes walkability and cycling, with compact neighbourhoods integrating residential, academic, and commercial uses, balancing historical preservation and modern growth.

Sounds bloody fantastic, doesn’t it? If I were to design a new town, it would be just like that. But Fitzwilliam Street, amongst many others, is too narrow. Indeed, it’s unacceptable, and I shouldn’t recommend that you live there because it’s eight paces wide, not twenty-five.

In another project, I recently stood with a planner and my client on a flat roof, a soon-to-be roof terrace. An opaque screen is being insisted upon to prevent views from the new terrace into a window on the other side of an adjacent terrace—more unacceptable living conditions. Catching a glimpse of your neighbour boiling the kettle is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

You can stand on this adjacent terrace and touch the window. Indeed, they could make you a cuppa. However, our new terrace is subject to current standards, so screening is required, despite not fixing the overlooking problem. I watched as, let’s call him Richard, tried to grapple with the absurdity of the situation imposed upon him. It would be pretty funny if it weren’t so stupid.

In these situations, I have to play the planning game, trying to mediate where the empirical observation of the existing context contradicts the prescriptive nature of the policy. It’s a stupid game, and that’s why more places aren’t like Cambridge. Bureaucracy drives uniformity and lacks the soul and vision to create such charming places. The quirks give cities their charm—the very thing that standardised planning ends up eliminating.

In other news, you can get planning in a French village by getting the local farmer to have a word with the mayor—a much better game.

This week’s web links include dark blue paint, Cambridge and Curry.

You will always find me at carl@carlarchitect.co.uk

​All the best

This Week’s Links:

Forty-eight hours in Cambridge: A Perfect Itinerary (by a local).

It’s time to make a curry.

The Best Time to Visit Thailand

I can recommend Hague Blue for your walls. Although I need to get my roller out again, it’s a bit patchy after two coats.

If you’ve 3.5 hours, this conversation with Eric Weinstein has some interesting bits.

Main Image credit: Pacing Cambridge streets, discovering charm in every narrow, historic corner. (DALL-E)