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.
