Cambridge by Train and Bike

Cambridge by Train and Bicycle

If you take away the crowds, the railway station at Cambridge could be admired for the pleasing Victorian structure it is, low rise and far-flung (an extremely long “double” main platform where two trains can pull up nose to tail).

Alas, the crowds cannot be taken away, and, so it seems, forever congest the small ticket hall and jostle through the narrow doors to and from the platforms.

“Redevelopment” is promised and is indeed underway, but constrained by the building’s Grade 2 listing (so little scope to build upwards, and the building is already elongated to match the supersized platform). OuWe shall see. For the time being the station remains under siege, if in a more lawful way than another hard-pressed station, the Eurotunnel terminus at Calais.

A building site immediately outside also blights the station’s approaches. This, apart from visually ruining the station’s forecourt, has actually ruined (through construction traffic) the station’s access road. This is pitted and rutted, as though designed to wreck as many of the City’s numerous bicycles as possible.

Who constitute the crowds? (I have no experience of, and do not write about, the rush hour users, who apparently suffer their own horrors.) Students of all sorts; and, around noon on a weekday, many, many tourists.

Cambridge is the beneficiary and victim of an excellent train service from King’s Cross. Fast non-stop trains run twice an hour, taking around 45 minutes. An easy day excursion to a city that can be “done”, tourist-wise, in a few hours. In fact it is probably the easiest city to visit as an extension of a London holiday, even a short one. (It takes the same time to get to Cambridge by train as it does to get to Greenwich by the river bus, for example.)

You begin to notice the tourists in the King’s Cross ticket office. They include a large number of far-eastern visitors, whose transactions at the ticket counter are often interminably prolonged, perhaps because they involve vouchers of some sort, which have to be laboriously transmuted into actual tickets, with much sucking of teeth and rushing off for second opinions on the part of the staff.

Your fellow passengers will largely be the tourists. You may accosted by one or two (perhaps in this case American – they still come), puzzled by the station announcement: “Rear four coaches Cambridge only. Passengers for Ely and Kings Lynn please travel in the front four coaches”. Does this mean that the front four do not go to Cambridge? A fair question on the face of the announcement, even if one was tempted to reply that it would be difficult for the front coaches not to go to Cambridge if the back four were going. But we should all be rightly wary of the occult ways of unfamiliar railway systems.

Off the train speeds, past Arsenal Football Club’s newish stadium, with its strange large painted fresco of former players’ backsides; then onwards through Hertfordshire farmland, and finally past the campus of Addenbrookes Hospital to the poor station and its inconveniences and ugly surroundings. It is not at present a fitting portal to one the country’s most beautiful cities.

Well, beautiful indeed – apart from the crowds, both human and vehicular. Cambridge’s roads are notoriously congested by traffic, if open to traffic, and by pedestrians, if pedestrianised. Cycles have relative freedom, if you don’t mind being confined to cycle lanes, but exist in uneasy symbiosis with the visitors, who tend not to look out for bikes. Riders must anticipate the erratic movements and sudden stops of phone wielding tourists, and react swiftly and with patience.

One sad effect of all this is that I, arriving on a train with a bike, tend to dread the Cambridge part of my journey to visit a relative living a little to the north of the City, in Girton.

I am put off by the station experience, the traffic, the crowds in the centre and the appalling state of many of the roads (the station road is about the worst).

My parents’ home was in Cambridge, although I was already a young adult when they moved there. I have fond memories of living there during university holidays. Then, the tides of visitors were more predictable. The undergraduates came up went down three times a year; the tourists on the whole came in the summer. So there were months when the City was just another East Anglian town, with wonderful buildings (as is true of many such towns). One could even stand on the platform of the near-empty station and admire it.

Today, the new main concourse at King’s Cross is a more restful place (and also to be admired).

October 2015