History of Cambridge
|
History of Cambridge
Featured Property
|
Local Information
Cambridge Misc Links
|
Cambridge, the city of crocuses and daffodils on the Backs, of green open spaces and cattle grazing only 500 yards from the market square. The Cambridge of Brooke, Byron, Newton and Rutherford, of the summer idyll of punts, 'bumps', cool willows and May Balls.
|
The City of Cambridge has long been regarded as a centre of excellence; there has been a settlement on the banks of the River Cam for nearly two thousand years, and in the 13th century the University was established, with the founding of the first College, Peterhouse.
|
Cambridge is located about 60 miles (100 Km) from London. Its university was founded in the eleventh century by disaffected academics from Oxford University. The oldest building from that time is in St John's College but the oldest surviving college is Peterhouse. Cambridge and Oxford are similar distances from London: Oxford lies to the west and Cambridge to the north. The distance was sufficiently great that the ruling monarch could not travel from London to either town in mediaeval times in one day.
|
The University has evolved slowly over the centuries and for much of the time it has been more like a collection of monasteries than the University that exists today. For example women could not get degrees until 1948 although they had been coming to Cambridge to study for over 100 years prior to that. Indeed, only in 1998 did the University finally get around to awarding degrees to some women students who should have graduated before 1948.
|
| Cambridge is no longer a sleepy university cum market town. It is a bustling city of over 109,000 people in the vanguard of the high-technology revolution. It is a city with many good shops ( the extraordinary variety and quality of the bookshops is a debt undoubtedly owed to the University), international conferences, and exciting festivals each summer. |
