As far as architecture students are concerned, there is an irony to the scale and grandeur of this town’s buildings. Despite its many cavernous halls and fair share of spires, space in Cambridge is a rarity. And so the “discovery” of the Forum, a disused shopping arcade on Jesus Lane, was cause for excitement for first year architecture student Paloma Gormley who, along with a group of other students, has worked since the end of exams to transform the building. As I sit on a makeshift bench staring at a wall of old TV screens two days before events begin, the building emanates an appeal more curious and far more powerful than the spires or columns of King’s or the Fitz. Whilst the architecture department suffers the embarrassment of being rather a cramped space for its subject, here there is plenty of room to play, providing a venue for a giddying May Week programme of music, theatre, fashion, film, and seemingly everything in between. Paloma remarks that to watch the transformations taking shape has been “a lot more real than what we’ve been doing for the rest of the year”. I can understand the architecture student’s thrill of practising what is usually just theoretical but the creative possibilities of this project are by no means confined to design. As we talk people drift in and out, among them members of the Cambridge Café project, a student group who set up temporary eateries and who stagger past weighed down by boxes of cake.

Slightly bashfully, I ask if there is any particular ethos to the project. She doesn’t hear. “Ethos” is repeated, a little painfully. Paloma however, seems to sit up, sleep deprivation forgotten. “Exchange” is this project’s keyword, one that, as she observes, fits in nicely not just with the eclecticism of events, but also the name of the building itself. No staid togas in this forum though: the spirit of this project is playful, inclusive and, I’d even venture, inspiring. When she begins running through the week’s programme of events I feel a little like Moley listening to Ratty’s picnic litany and certainly just as greedy. And, on the theme of children’s literature, the first day of events began with an Alice in Wonderland themed tea party, whose modest entrance fee itself seemed charmingly nostalgic. The financial sense of the word is perhaps the only irrelevant aspect of “exchange”; Paloma looks around her and confirms that everything has been “scavenged, sourced, found”, concluding that “I can’t see anything paid for”. Among the objects that fall under her gaze is an organ bought off eBay for 1p that later comes into its own in providing music to play bingo by.

It’s not just the programme of events that is dizzying – the ideas surrounding this endeavour are a little like the flocks of paper aeroplanes set to race down the length of the building. (Paper aeroplane building/racing has been one of many workshops although the distinctions between workshop, performance and pleasure are pleasingly blurred.) The idea of reclaiming space is one of the project’s most compelling features, proving that urban ecology need not be confined to London’s East End. The swapshop concept, orchestrated under the Three Seas group’s banner, is the greenest embodiment of “exchange” but equally attractive is the idea of forming a forum for more esoteric talents - I’m thinking, for example, of those woefully overlooked skills of hula-jazz dancing and fortune reading.

The fun of this project is so much more compelling than your average May Week piss-up and I’m willingly carried along by its many flights of whimsy. There is however seriousness in all the silliness: there seems to be here an implicit invitation to swap the ethos of attainment and end result (which is callowly so often deemed a problem peculiar to Cambridge) for one of process and experience. Having visited the project yesterday, the Master of Jesus College has allowed it to be kept indefinitely as a community space. It’s hugely exciting to think that this last week has seen the institution of something so worthwhile which looks set to be one of Cambridge’s most charming spaces and certainly one of its most interesting projects.

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