In an effort to leave work behind and celebrate my birthday, last Easter Term my friends and I left deadlines behind in Market Square and cycled in the early evening to Grantchester Meadows. Nestled between two trees along the river, bikes locked to a (hopefully) secure fence, we laid out our blanket and uncorked a bottle of Prosecco. Spring had finally bloomed into summer; it was past nine and the sky was still blue and cloudless. Mid-chat, we paused to face the mysterious rustle in the bushes only to find a man, entirely naked, head held high, walking past us with a backpack on. Presuming he had been skinny-dipping in the river, we side-eyed each other, stifled a laugh, and resumed conversation with our guard slightly up

“Mid-chat, we paused to face the mysterious rustle in the bushes only to find a man, entirely naked, head held high, walking past us with a backpack on”

We wouldn’t return for weeks, caught in the thrall of work, but on our final day of first year we ventured back to savour one last sun-soaked afternoon before we left Cambridge. Some of my friends even braved the polluted waters. Then cue not just one nude man, but around six naked swimmers, chatting amiably as they drifted past us in the river. When they climbed up on the bank and walked back they seemed completely unaware of – or unbothered by – my friends and I staring resolutely in the opposite direction. Had we missed a nudist sign at the meadow gate? One quick internet search later revealed that four nudist swimming groups thrive around the river Cam, and a plethora of articles professed the benefits of nude, cold water swimming. Suddenly I felt like the prudish, conservative one. But still I was left wondering: what is going on in Grantchester meadows?

A lot, it turns out. I was unaware that our retreat was, in true Cambridge fashion, part of a centuries-long tradition. We were not the first to mount bikes and search for the ‘unacademic stream’ of the countryside, as Rupert Brooke would say (‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’). A hundred years ago, a group of undergraduates took to the meadows just as we did to rest on its banks – except they were naked. Known as the ‘neo-Pagans’, and then the ‘Grantchester Group’, they would bathe in the river, sleep under the stars, and throw raucous parties in Orchard House in the village. Poet Rupert Brooke and writers like Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster also dropped by for a moonlit dip.

“Cycle past that quiet suburb bordering the meadow, and succumb to stripping”

Feeling homesick in Berlin in 1912, Brooke longed for the Grantchester they ran to, ‘For in Cambridge people rarely smile/ Being urban, squat, and packed with guile’. It’s true that an exam term here can make you feel just like that. Swim far enough along the Cam and you wind up at Byron’s pool, a nature reserve that is said to have been the waters the young poet bathed in during his time at Trinity two centuries prior. It is this pool that Brooke and Woolf swam in in 1911, and where ‘His ghostly Lordship swims his pool/ And tries his strokes, essays the tricks,/ Long learnt on the Hellespont, or Styx’.

Fast forward 40 years, and you’ll find Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes floating together in that pool too. In 1959, Plath extolled its beauty in ‘Watercolor of Grantchester Meadow’, adding that:

’While the students stroll or sit,

Hands laced, in a moony indolence of love…

Black-gowned, but unaware

How in such mild air

The owl shall stoop from his turret, the rat cry out.’

We may be ‘black-gowned’, but to Plath we are ignorant to the natural aestheticism lying beyond our ‘moony indolence of love’. Go forward ten years and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd would echo Brooke and Plath too in ‘Grantchester Meadows’, a seven minute track that is filled with skylark song, the bleating of a swan, water rushing in the river and a buzzing bee, threaded together by his light acoustic guitar. Waters croons of ‘Basking in the sunshine of a bygone afternoon’ and the ‘endless summer’ in the ‘lazy water meadow’. Grantchester then, is abound with artistic inspiration – and the urge to strip naked, apparently. Falling down this rabbit hole has led me to one conclusion: cycle past that quiet suburb bordering the meadow, and succumb to stripping. Nudity in the meadows is a seemingly cultural, artistic and literary tradition. Academia breaks decorum loose. Perhaps I need to add another entry to my university bucket list.