This square has earned its keep for a very long time. Cambridge traded here before the Norman Conquest, when the town grew around the bridge and a Saxon market took hold. So this is not some polite backdrop for postcards... it is a working patch of ground that has fed, soaked, argued with, and occasionally enraged the city for roughly a thousand years.
One man, in particular, helped keep this square watered. Thomas Hobson, the Cambridge carrier - you’ll meet him properly at his old yard later - funded the Hobson’s Conduit between sixteen ten and sixteen fourteen, piping fresh spring water from Nine Wells into the town. From sixteen fourteen to eighteen fifty-six, his stone conduit head stood right here on Market Hill, a fountain for the market traders.
Now, take a moment and look toward the little Gothic stone canopy near the center of the square. That one dates from eighteen fifty-five, designed by G. M. Hills. It replaced Hobson’s earlier fountain after the Great Fire of Cambridge, on the fifteenth of September, eighteen forty-nine.
That fire tore through a medieval market that looked very different from this open rectangle. Wooden houses and workshops stood here, packed into an L-shaped trading space, almost like a shanty town in the middle of the market. Townspeople tried to fight the blaze with buckets from Hobson’s fountain... but the key was missing. Because of course it was. So they hauled water from the Cam in a long human chain, too late to stop it. Eight houses burned down, others suffered heavy damage, and by eighteen fifty-five the cleared site had become the broad square you see now.
Around the edges, trade kept changing shape. Petty Cury preserves the medieval name parva cokeria, meaning a small row of cookshops. Near the Guildhall, the building from nineteen thirty-nine by Cowles-Voysey, an earlier tollbooth by James Essex once stood beside the old shire house, the county court building, with Butter Row squeezed between them, a narrow lane of dairy stalls.
And Cambridge trade did not stop here. Downriver, Stourbridge Fair grew into the greatest fair in medieval Europe, a temporary wooden town so large it hired every carpenter in Cambridge; by nineteen thirty-three it had shrunk to one lonely youth with an ice-cream barrow. Here, though, the market still keeps going seven days a week.
When you’re ready, leave the square at its south-west corner and walk a short way down Bene’t Street. The low pale-fronted pub on your right with the coaching arch - and the blue plaque outside the door - is The Eagle, the next stop.
