Cambridge Audio Tours

Cambridge exists because of a riot. In 1209, a group of scholars fled Oxford after a dispute with townsfolk turned violent, settled in a small market town on the River Cam, and started what became the University of Cambridge. The town has been trying to work out its relationship with those academics ever since. The university eventually gained control over the town's bakers and brewers by royal charter, a grievance the locals nursed for centuries. Today the tension shows up in more subtle ways: impossibly high house prices, streets crowded with cyclists, and a city ranked simultaneously as one of the most innovative places in Britain and its most unequal.

The physical concentration of the place is extraordinary.

King's College Chapel, begun in 1446 by Henry VI and finished seventy years later under Henry VIII, faces the oldest surviving church in Cambridgeshire, St Bene't's, across no great distance at all. The Backs, the green meadows running behind the older colleges, are so consistently beautiful that they made the chair of the National Trust's list of the ten greatest views in England. The River Cam flows through it all, carrying students in flat-bottomed punts who are more optimistic about their ability to steer than the situation usually warrants.