On your right, All Saints Passage looks modest, but in eighteen fifty-one, number two held a whole binding business inside one household: John Bowtell, seventy-three, a widower and bookbinder born in Cambridge; his grandson William Bowtell, seventeen, already working as a bookbinder; and William Robinson, eighteen, their assistant. Three men, one trade, one address... probably surrounded by paste, leather, thread, and the sort of patience that can outlast an argument.
Then the record turns painfully human. Romilly’s diary noted a family tragedy in April eighteen forty-nine: “Poor Miss Bowtell poisoned herself... she was found dead and there was poison in her stomach.” A small passage, but not a small life.
This lane fed into the Cambridge book trade - printers, binders, sellers - which gathered around Trinity Street, King’s Parade, and Bene’t Street from the sixteenth century onward. The corner shop at one Trinity Street has sold books continuously since fifteen eighty-one. And Cambridge mattered far beyond its lanes: along with Oxford and London, it stood among the three major centres of English binding from the middle ages onward. Its “Cambridge style” used books sewn on raised cords - the ridges under the spine - then covered them in calfskin, masked and sprinkled to make stained panels, with Dutch marbled endpapers, the decorative sheets inside the covers, and red edges. Even the books dressed rather well.
The medieval church of All Saints-in-the-Jewry stood here until eighteen sixty-five; G F Bodley designed its replacement on Jesus Lane in eighteen sixty-four. Since about nineteen eighty-nine, this former churchyard has hosted a Saturday craft market where local makers have traded.
Step back out onto Trinity Street and turn right, north. The next great gateway on your left, flanked by stone turrets and crowned with the painted statue of Henry the Eighth, is Trinity College Great Gate - the next stop.
