There seems something almost embarrassing about admitting at university that I’m originally from Cambridge, and responses can often be along the lines of “don’t want to be away from home, then?” But when the best university in the world is on your doorstep, it would be ludicrous to turn it down just because you’ve been to the city before. Admittedly, quite a few times.

I love Cambridge, and even more so as a student. I never felt it would be big enough to have two sides to it – that of city and university – but there are places I frequent as a student that I had never even heard of before. And having insider knowledge (and a CamCard) is invaluable for student and civilian life, such as for when my mum said “We’ve never been to Curry King, shall we try there?”

“The exodus of over 12,000 undergraduates leaves the city feeling a little lethargic and empty”

That said, the fact is that Cambridge is a university located in a town, where other universities are based in places that are first and foremost cities in their own right. There is always a tangibly different atmosphere depending on whether or not term is on, even from a civilian perspective, and the exodus of over 12,000 undergraduates leaves the city feeling a little lethargic and empty. I get the feeling at times that, although I’ve never left the bubble, the bubble has certainly upped and left me.


But being both town and gown is mostly joyful. Knowing the layout of Cambridge is unbelievably helpful when leaving a club slightly the worse for wear, and knowing that I can meet my parents or ask them to bring me stuff without them needing to take time off work, drive miles or even book flights is hugely reassuring. Using King’s as a shortcut to the Backs in the vac is probably not what my CamCard is for but it’s how it’s largely getting used.

I do feel that I am in a new place in many respects, and my parents and I treat it as though I were in Edinburgh, my insurance choice, or an equally faraway place. We don’t meet all the time, I don’t ask them to do my grocery shopping or laundry, and feel no compulsion to go home. But knowing that you can counts for a great deal when you’re starting out in a new environment, if not a new place.

The only real problems I have are when people ask me for restaurant recommendations for when their parents come to visit them. My mind goes utterly blank. I generally shriek “NOT ZIZZI. I HATE ZIZZI” and then they inevitably go to Zizzi and have a perfectly nice time. And passing places I’ve been with university friends, and recalling the good times spent there, can make the city feel slightly hollow without them. At night-time in the vac there is no Van of Life to see you through Market Square. Things that seem perfectly acceptable in term, such as a burger at 3am, feel a bit questionable. When townie friends invite me on nights out to spots I frequent as a student, I sometimes turn them down on the basis that it would just feel a bit wrong – the atmosphere of student and townie nights are hugely different.

Cambridge and I: the question of identity

There is a fundamental difference between being ‘in’ Cambridge and being ‘at’ Cambridge, and the latter state of being is not predicated by location. For me, Cambridge University is my friends, the atmosphere in college and the learning, whereas the city is the buildings, albeit very beautiful ones. In the early days of the Christian Church the word ‘ecclesia’ was used in defining the church. Although this means ‘church,’ it was used not to describe the edifice in which meetings were held, but as the collective term for the people who constituted it. I feel the same attitude towards the term ‘Cambridge,’ and this is how friends and I have turned restaurants, airports and more into ‘Cambridge’ when we were far from the city itself.

This is perhaps the most dislocating thing about being in the city as a townie rather than a gownie. That magical quality of Cambridgeness, which is so intrinsic to term time, is almost completely devoid. It’s especially unexpected given the fact that the colleges, faculties, the UL and so much more are just in front of you.


When applying here, it was surprising at the time how easy it was for me to divorce the idea of the city I’ve always lived in from the idea of Cambridge University. I understand now why I could. They are not, and shouldn’t be, the same thing. But this just adds to the magic of Cambridge, and makes the prospect of digging deeper and deeper into Cambridge life all the more exciting