Cambridge Audio Tour: Bedders, Bargees and Booksellers

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.

Stand here and look at Trinity’s Great Gate as a piece of labor before you see it as a symbol. The lower part of the gate and the stretches beside it likely went up in or just before the fourteen nineties. From fourteen ninety to fourteen ninety-two, the college spent one hundred and fifty-eight pounds on the work... very roughly the value of many tens of thousands of pounds now. William Swayn, a master mason, handled doors, windows, and stone and kept turning up in the records until fifteen oh five. John Wastell, a freemason - meaning a highly skilled stone carver and builder - appears in fourteen ninety-one to ninety-two and again in fourteen ninety-six to ninety-seven. Then in fourteen ninety-five, the college struck its agreement with the carpenter for the roof. No romance there, just bills, deadlines, and somebody probably muttering at the timber. Now look up at Henry the Eighth’s right hand. If you see a sceptre, that is the two thousand and twenty-three version, installed for King Charles the Third’s seventy-fifth birthday. If a wooden chair leg has returned... that is not a daring Victorian undergraduate. A window-cleaner did it around nineteen eighty. He later said, “I took a leg off... leaned out the window with my friend holding onto me and plonked it in the hand.” Before that, the king held a golden orb and sword. Paris Andrew got paid to carve the statue in sixteen hundred to oh one, but he did not finish it; William Cure the Younger completed the east-facing figure in sixteen fifteen, in a London workshop. And inside this grand frame lived a whole workforce. Porters once doubled as barbers until eighteen sixty-one. Cambridge’s college bedders kept everything running: women who walked in from town lodgings before dawn, because colleges would not house them, hauling coal and water upstairs, lighting fires, waking students, bringing breakfast, changing linen, polishing silver. By the mid nineteenth century, husband-and-wife teams worked the staircases with gyps, the male college servants. The gown needed the town... thoroughly. Walk south along Trinity Street. After about one hundred metres, stop at the shopfront with the blue Heffers logo.

William Heffer did not begin life looking like a future Cambridge institution. He came from Exning in Suffolk, the son of an agricultural labourer, and by eighteen seventy-one he was working as a groom, with the sort of prospects that did not usually end on Trinity Street. Then a modest loan nudged the story sideways. In July of eighteen seventy-six, he opened a small shop at one hundred and four Fitzroy Street... selling stationery first, not books. Pens before poetry. Sensible, really. Books crept in through bibles and academic texts, and by eighteen ninety-six Heffers had opened its bookshop at three and four Petty Cury, where it stayed for seventy-four years. This became a family machine as much as a shop: seven of William’s nine children became directors, and five worked in the business. Even the staff could stay for a lifetime. R D Littlechild started as a bookselling apprentice on the twenty-fifth of April, nineteen oh three, on two shillings a week... about a dozen pounds today... and served for fifty-four years. Not much job-hopping there. This Trinity Street home came in September of nineteen seventy, inside the Wolfson Building designed by Austin-Smith: Lord. Its open plan, galleries, and descending levels felt, as Pevsner said, “something quite new for a British bookshop.” Nearby, the trade had old company: Bowes & Bowes at one Trinity Street traces its roots to fifteen eighty-one, and Deighton Bell began at Green Street in seventeen seventy-eight under master bookbinder John Deighton. Heffers bought Deighton Bell in nineteen eighty-seven. Four generations of Heffers ran the firm until Blackwell’s bought it in nineteen ninety-nine. Walk south to the end of Trinity Street and on into King’s Parade. The next stop is the long stone screen on your right, facing King’s College Chapel - Wilkins’s 1820s screen, opposite the gown-makers at number twenty-two.

In front of you is the frame that makes King’s Parade look like Cambridge in a postcard: William Wilkins’s screen, designed between eighteen twenty-two and eighteen twenty-eight. It is not just decoration. It is a formal street front, with a central gateway and porters’ lodges... little rooms for the college gatekeepers. Across the road, the university’s other great need got stitched, hemmed, and sold. At number twenty-two, Ryder and Amies supplied Cambridge for more than a century and a half. Joseph Ryder founded the business in eighteen sixty-four. Edward William Amies joined him as partner in eighteen ninety-six, and later served as Mayor of Cambridge in nineteen twenty-seven to nineteen twenty-eight. A directory in nineteen thirteen described the firm with admirable thoroughness: tailors, robe makers, hosiers, hatters, shirtmakers, and clerical outfitters... meaning they could dress a don, a student, or a clergyman without breaking stride. Cambridge does love a specialist. For years, robes and scarves were made in workrooms above the shop; only in the nineteen eighties did production move out to a Fenland workshop. Now cast your eye north to number one Trinity Street, where King’s Parade meets it. William Scarlett was already running a bookshop there in fifteen eighty-one. Daniel and Alexander Macmillan took over in eighteen forty-six. Alexander moved the publishing side to London in eighteen sixty-three, leaving Robert Bowes to carry on. By nineteen oh seven it traded as Bowes and Bowes; since nineteen ninety-two, it has been the Cambridge University Press bookshop. When you’re ready, walk north up King’s Parade. After about a hundred metres, just where King’s Parade meets Trinity Street, the narrow cobbled alley on your right, beside the Senate House and under the Caius - pronounced Keys - ceremonial gates, is Senate House Passage - the next stop.

Cambridge loved grandeur, but it also loved a paper trail. The Senate House began in seventeen twenty-two to James Gibbs’s design, and the records still name the crew. Building stone came from Christopher Cass, a mason in London. The Senate approved the roof contract for Thomas Phillips and Benjamin Timbrell in January of seventeen twenty-three to twenty-four. James Essex senior made the sash windows, then the wainscoting, those wooden wall panels, while Cass laid the marble floor. In October of seventeen twenty-five, the university ordered Isaac Mansfield to do the plain plastering, and G Artari with J Bagutti to add the ceiling ornaments. The whole thing cost thirteen thousand pounds, with thousands more for the site and extras... something like a few million pounds in modern terms. Gibbs, the architect, received one hundred and fifty-one pounds, roughly tens of thousands today. Designers have been underpaid for quite a while. Behind it, the Old Schools handled the university’s real obsession: administration. The bedells were ceremonial officers, but not just decorative ones. Cambridge elected two, one for theology and canon law, meaning church law, and one for arts. They attended disputations, formal academic debates, and university ceremonies. The proctors did the harder policing: they controlled lectures, disputations, and inceptions, formal degree acts, punished rule-breakers, and even kept the university chest and the cautions, which were financial deposits. Their silver maces, those heavy staffs of office, appear in university use as early as twelve seventy-six. The three still carried today came from George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, chancellor from sixteen twenty-six to sixteen twenty-eight. And then the town snapped. During the Cambridge Peasants’ Revolt, the fifteenth to sixteenth of June, thirteen eighty-one, townspeople stormed Great Saint Mary’s up the passage, seized the university’s bulls and charters, and burned them in the market. They also took Corpus Christi’s plate and founding charter from the porters’ lodge and threw those on too. Margery Starre scattered the ashes “to the four winds,” crying, “away with the learning of clerks, away with it!” On the south side here, Caius set out his gates of Humility, Virtue, and Honour. Graduates still pass through the Gate of Honour for their degrees... proof that Cambridge never really stopped turning paperwork into theater. Step out from the east end of the passage onto Senate House Hill. The wide open ground just ahead of you, beyond Great Saint Mary’s Church, is Cambridge Market Square - the next stop.

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.

On your left stands a survivor from the age before Norman castles and college courts. St Bene’t’s tower most likely rose between about the year one thousand and ten fifty, and it is the oldest surviving structure in Cambridgeshire. Look at the corners and you can still spot the Saxon masons’ long-and-short quoins... those are the alternating tall and short corner stones. They set local clunch, a soft chalky limestone, with field flint and harder limestone blocks, and they spent real money doing it. The parish calls it a substantial and costly build, and you can see why: this tower quietly announces that eleventh-century Cambridge had cash, skill, and ambition well before the Norman Conquest. This church belonged to the working town as much as the learned one. Artisans lived here between the river and the market, and in the fourteenth century Cambridge guilds used the church too, giving money for furnishing, preaching, and poor relief. Practical piety, you might say. Out of those guilds grew Corpus Christi next door, and St Bene’t’s served as a chapel of Corpus for more than two centuries. Then comes one of the great Cambridge specialists in useful cleverness: Fabian Stedman. Born in sixteen forty, he went to London to apprentice with the master printer Daniel Pakeman, then published Tintinnalogia in sixteen sixty-eight and wrote as well as published Campanalogia in sixteen seventy-seven, the first two books on change ringing. That is the mathematical art of ringing bells in changing patterns rather than simple tunes. The parish says Stedman served here as parish clerk in sixteen seventy and likely taught the ringers in this tower. So yes, one working printer may have turned bell-ringing into applied combinatorics for unpaid Sunday volunteers. The six bells keep the record: sixteen sixty-three, fifteen eighty-eight, sixteen oh seven, eighteen twenty-five, sixteen ten, and sixteen eighteen. Friday night is still practice night. On Sundays they ring from nine oh five to nine fifty-five. Weddings get a full peal; funerals, half-muffled bells. And here, near the chancel, the space around the altar, Thomas Hobson was buried in January sixteen thirty-one... without inscription, without monument. Thomas Fuller, only twenty-two, took the funeral. This is where the carrier’s working day actually ended. Step out of St Bene’t’s and walk west along Bene’t Street to its end at Trumpington Street. Turn left, and the entrance to Corpus Christi College is just there on your left - the next stop.

Look at Corpus Christi, and you’re looking at something rare in Cambridge: a college the town built for itself. Not a king’s project, not a bishop’s vanity. In thirteen forty-nine, as the Black Death tore through Cambridge, three guildsmen - William Horwode, Henry de Tangmere, and John Hardy - founded the Guild of Corpus Christi. Later that same year, they joined it to the older Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which the plague had devastated. Their patron, Henry, Duke of Lancaster, asked King Edward the Third for a licence to found a college, and in thirteen fifty-two the crown agreed. What rose here was modest, almost stubbornly so. Old Court began at once, and by thirteen fifty-six it could house the Master and two fellows. It claims to be the oldest continually inhabited courtyard in the country... a claim Merton College in Oxford disputes, because of course it does. But Corpus kept Old Court for a very practical reason: it stayed poor. The college could not afford grand replacement buildings, so these medieval rooms survived. Some still keep their original stone sills and jambs, grooves that once held oil-soaked linen in place of glass. Medieval glazing, Cambridge style: functional, smoky, and probably not draft-proof. For more than two hundred years, Corpus had no chapel at all, so students worshipped next door at St Bene’t’s. College life here also rested on people who rarely make the postcards. In the Chapter Book of sixteen forty-five, the college ordered, “Bedmakers to be instructed that on Sundays they should make haste so that they can attend services at their churches.” Make haste, then haul coal, carry water, light fires, wake students, bring breakfast. Even the waiters in Hall were bedmakers, in bonnets and little shawls. Much later, Phyliss Creek kept Number Seven for twenty-one years, conscientious and house-proud. And then the sting in the tale: in thirteen eighty-one, Corpus itself was caught up in the town revolt, and its plate and founding charter went into the flames too. A generation after local craftsmen created this college, the town already saw it as part of the university establishment. That, in one brutal bonfire, is gown and town parting company. Walk back out onto Trumpington Street and turn left, heading south. After about seventy metres the open court on your right, with the iron railings and the lawn behind, is St Catharine’s main entrance - the next stop.

On your left, at this gate, you’re standing on ground that once worked a lot harder than it looks. For sixty-three years, this was the yard of the George Inn, Thomas Hobson’s base on Trumpington Street... the busiest carrier yard in Cambridge. From here, wagons set out regularly for London, heading by way of Ware to the Bull at Bishopsgate, a three-day run each way, hauling mail, parcels, books, students’ letters home, and sometimes the students themselves. Hobson inherited the business in fifteen sixty-eight and kept a stable of about forty horses, far more than the post required, because Cambridge scholars always wanted to hire a mount. His rule was beautifully blunt: you took the horse next to the stable door, or none at all. There it is... Hobson’s choice. Not freedom, exactly. More a well-organized lack of options. His business survived a near-century of plague, weather, and the worst potholes the road to Ware could offer - until the great plague of sixteen thirty grounded him, and the carts stopped for good. You'll have heard the rest of his story walking up here. The college behind the gate came earlier, founded in fourteen seventy-three by Robert Wodelarke, but this Main Court rose later, between sixteen seventy-three and seventeen oh four, after older buildings came down. Walk a couple of minutes south down Trumpington Street. On your right, look for the Tudor-Gothic building with battlements and a lattice oriel - a little projecting window - above the door: the Pitt Building.

This sharply dressed Gothic building honors William Pitt the Younger, a Pembroke undergraduate who became Britain’s youngest prime minister in seventeen eighty-three at the age of twenty-four. After Pitt died in eighteen oh six, his memorial committee paid for a statue in Hanover Square, discovered it still had money left over, and offered Cambridge enough to give the University Press a handsome home. Edward Blore, later architect to Queen Victoria, drew it. Builders laid the foundation stone on the eighteenth of October, eighteen thirty-one, finished the job in eighteen thirty-three, and spent ten thousand, seven hundred and eleven pounds, eight shillings and nine pence... roughly a million pounds in modern terms. The Press itself, though, is older by three centuries. Henry the Eighth granted letters patent in fifteen thirty-four, making Cambridge University Press the oldest university press in the world. That charter let Cambridge choose three stationers and printers - book tradesmen, really - to print works approved by the Chancellor. A splendid idea, though actual printing took its time. Not until fifteen eighty-three did Cambridge have a printer who truly printed books: Thomas Thomas of King’s College. His first book, in fifteen eighty-four, had the wonderfully firm title Two Treatises of the Lord His Holie Supper. Now glance up at the oriel window above the entrance... that room still pulls its weight. The Oriel Room is where the Syndicate - the Press's governing committee - still meets to approve Press business. Before this building, John Field ran the Press and set up a printing house on land now occupied by the Master’s Lodge of St Catharine’s College. John Hayes followed him, then Cornelius Crownfield, described as a Dutchman and a very ingenious man. In printer-speak, that is high praise. Then came Charles John Clay. Cambridge partnered with him in eighteen fifty-four; he dominated the Press for forty years, at least quadrupled turnover in his first decade, and retired in eighteen ninety-four, leaving his son John in charge. Between eighteen sixty-three and eighteen seventy-eight, Clay added machine rooms, warehouses, and a foundry. Inside, compositors set type by hand from cases. Capitals sat in the upper case, small letters in the lower case... and there you have two everyday phrases born in a print shop. Their union meeting was called a Chapel, and its elected steward was the Father of the Chapel. For over a century, this place worked as Cambridge University Press in the most literal sense. The presses finally moved to Shaftesbury Road in nineteen sixty-three; today the building serves as offices and conference rooms. Walk south down Trumpington Street. Mill Lane is the next turning on your right, leading to the Mill Pond; the pub on the corner with the river behind it is the Mill, your final stop. If you want to look inside later, check the current opening times.

Here at the Mill Pond, the working day comes to rest... or at least it swaps sacks of grain for pints. On your right is The Mill, but long before the pub took over, this stretch of the Cam earned its keep the hard way. The Domesday Book, back in ten eighty-six, already counted two mills here on the river then called the Granta: one belonged to the Abbot of Ely, the other to a certain Count Alan. In time they became the Bishop's Mill and King's Mill, and they stood so close they shared the same roof. Medieval cooperation, Cambridge style: the King's miller got first claim on the water in drought, and if he had no corn to grind, the Bishop's miller could use the flow... for a fee, naturally. Even water came with terms and conditions. For centuries, barges brought grain here to be ground. From the late eighteenth century to eighteen forty-two, the Nutter family ran both mills. Then Ebenezer Foster took over, but the railway changed the math. He built new mills on Station Road, where steam and rail could do what water no longer could. By nineteen twenty-eight, the council gave up on the old buildings, cleared the area, and rebuilt the sluices and slipway instead. That slipway still tells the story. It is the old wharf line, and the weir marks the mill-wheel line. Today punts and canoes get hauled over rollers around the weir; once, workers and barge men shifted grain and flour along the same route to Lynn, and from there onward to London. The cargo changed, but the river kept the books. The pub itself began in the late eighteenth century as the Hazard Arms, named for Henry Hazard, a merchant who leased a malting house by the wharf. It served mill workers and thirsty barge men, which feels like honest work for a pub. And just up the road runs another thread of working water: Hobson's Conduit, funded between sixteen ten and sixteen fourteen by Thomas Hobson, carrying spring water to the conduit head and into the King's Ditch near Trumpington Street and Pembroke Street, part of the same practical water system you met by the market. So this is where the walk closes: coal unloaded at Quayside, grain unloaded here, flour sent back down the Cam. A neat little circle, with better logistics than poetry. This is the last stop, and if you fancy extending the journey, punt operators at the slipway can take you up toward the colleges or back to Magdalene Bridge where you began.