The centre of Cambridge is a confusing mess. With its buildings nustling and jostling and practically falling on top of each other, punctuated by the vast green of a college lawn (which you can’t even walk on anyway), it seems as if not only the people but the buildings themselves are competing for space.

Like that ever-evasive supervision room somewhere at the back, up some stairs, round a corner and far away in God-knows-what-college-this-week, the artistic spaces of Cambridge seem equally hidden away, or at least pretty small.

Art rooms in particular seem increasingly under threat; or, in the growing demand for room, in obscure or impractical places: the rather dingy Pembroke art room is unlikely to be much help to the next Rembrandt, given that there are only shadows.  In recent years, several college art rooms have been replaced.  The Art Room high amongst the rafters of King’s, however, is one space that is both creatively productive and well-located and lit.  It may sound a bit boring talking about random rooms you can find in colleges, but Virginia Woolf was not far off the mark when she noticed how necessary a little bit of peace and quiet is to creativity.

The idea, I suppose, is one of escape.  Where, in this claustrophobic eight-week sprint, can provide this?  Maybe we should learn to appreciate the diversion, as well as inspiration all the little hidden-away spaces of Cambridge provide.  The Corpus Playroom is probably the most underrated and potentially brilliant dramatic space in Cambridge.  Dwarfed by its big Arts Theatre uncle it may be, but the tight focus and confrontational intimacy of the Playroom has housed musicals, tragedies, recitals and more.  Perhaps the modest dimensions serve to increase the intensity; it is the kind of place which, if explored fully, can offer, as Marlowe once wrote, ‘infinite riches in a little room’.

At the same time, some of Cambridge’s most loved poetic alumni chose to actually escape the spires and cycles, rather than bury themselves inside and beneath them.  Lord Byron, whenever I imagine the large bear he kept in his Trinity Rooms got a little too much to handle, went on his own teddy bear’s picnic to a little spot amongst the woods in Grantchester, now named Byron’s Pool.  I imagine he loved the spot for its tranquillity; the swans murmuring by every now and then; the delightful sun-bathed pastoral images of the surrounding countryside.  Now, however, you have to put up with the picnic benches and slightly stagnating water as well. 

Escape, or distance, as Edward Said wrote in Orientalism, is a condition which can free the creative mind and allow it freedom from the pressures and preoccupations of workaday life. However, if you want some of that in Cambridge, you’re going to have to look quite hard to find a room of your own: unless Caffe Neros will do.

Eliot Crabtree