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Cambridge

There are nearly 30 Cambridges spread around the globe, but this, the original, is the one that the whole world knows as one of the leading university cities. Cambridge was an important town many centuries before the scholars arrived, standing at the point where forest met fen, at the lowest fording point of the river. The Romans took over a site previously settled by an Iron Age Belgic tribe, to be followed in turn by the Saxons and the Normans.

Soon after the Norman Conquest, William I built a wooden motte-and-bailey castle; Edward I built a stone replacement: a mound still marks the spot. The town flourished as a market and river trading centre, and in 1209 a group of students fleeing the Oxford riots arrived.

The first of the Colleges was Peterhouse, founded by the Bishop of Ely in 1284, followed in the next century by Clare, Pembroke, Gonville & Caius, Trinity Hall and Corpus Christi. The total is now more than 30; the most distinctive of the modern colleges is Robinson College, built in striking post-modern style in 1977; it has the look of a fortress, its concrete structure covered with a 'skin' of a million and a quarter hand-made red Dorset bricks. It was the gift of the self-made millionaire engineer and racehorse owner David Robinson. All the colleges are well worth a visit, but places that simply must not be missed include King's College Chapel with its breathtaking fan vaulting, glorious stained glass and Peter Paul Rubens' Adoration of the Magi; Pepys Library, including his diaries, in Magdalene College; and Trinity's wonderful Great Court. A trip by punt along the 'Backs' of the Cam brings a unique view of many of the colleges and passes under six bridges, including the Bridge of Sighs (St John's) and the extraordinary wooden Mathematical Bridge at Queens.

Cambridge has nurtured more Nobel Prize winners than most countries - 32 from Trinity alone - and the list of celebrated alumni covers every sphere of human endeavour and achievement: Byron, Tennyson, Milton and Wordsworth; Marlowe and Bacon; Samuel Pepys; Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin; Charles Babbage, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein; actors Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Derek Jacobi and Stephen Fry; Lord Burghley; Harold Abrahams, who ran for England in the Olympics; and Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt, who spied for Russia. The 'Cambridge Mafia' was the title given to a group of senior Conservatives at Cambridge together in the early 1960. Their number included Ken Clarke, John Gummer, Norman Lamont, Peter Lilley and Michael Howard, all in John Major's 1992 cabinet, Norman Fowler and Leon Brittan. Pembroke College, the third oldest, produced an impressive array of comedy stars and writers, including Peter Cook, Eric Idle, Clive James, Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor. The best way to see the Colleges is on an official TourCambridge guided tour (book on 0871 226 8006 or at the TIC). There are also open-top bus tours round the city and 'chauffeured' punt tours on the River Cam.

The Colleges apart, Cambridge is packed with interest for the visitor, with a wealth of grand buildings both religious and secular, and some of the country's leading museums, many of them run by the University. The Fitzwilliam Museum is renowned for its art collection, which includes works by Titian, Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Turner, Renoir, Picasso and Cezanne, and for its antiquities from Egypt, Greece and Rome. Kettle's Yard has a permanent display of 20th-century paintings and sculptures in a house maintained just as it was when the Ede family donated it, with the collection, to the University in 1967. The Museum of Classical Archaeology has 500 plaster casts of Greek and Roman statues, and the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology covers worldwide prehistoric archaeology with special displays relating to Oceania and to the Cambridge area. The Museum of Technology, housed in a Victorian sewage pumping station, features an impressive collection of steam, gas and electric pumping engines and examples great and small of local industrial technology. Anyone with an interest in fossils should make tracks to the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, while in the same street (Downing) the Museum of Zoology offers a comprehensive and spectacular survey of the animal kingdom. The Whipple Museum of the History of Science tells about science through instruments; the Scott Polar Research Institute has fascinating, often poignant exhibits relating to Arctic and Antarctic exploration; and the University Botanic Garden boasts a plant collection (more than 8,000 species) that rivals those of Kew Gardens and Edinburgh. The 40-acre site includes the National Collections of species tulips, fritillaries and hardy geraniums.

The work and life of the people of Cambridge and the surrounding area are the subjects of the Cambridge and County Folk Museum, housed in a 16th century building that for 300 years was the White Horse Inn. It traces the everyday lives of the local people from 1700 onwards, with sections devoted to crafts and trades, town & gown, witchbottles, skating, and eels. One of the city's greatest treasures is the University Library, one of the world's great research libraries with six million books, one million maps and 350,000 manuscripts.

Cambridge also has many fine Churches, some of them used by the colleges before they built their own chapels. Among the most notable are St Mary the Less, originally dedicated to St Peter (from which nearby Peterhouse College gets its name); St Benet's (its 11th-century tower is the oldest in the county); St Mary the Great, the 'University Church', a marvellous example of Late Perpendicular Gothic; Our Lady & the English Martyrs; Holy Trinity, known for its connections with the Evangelical movement, and St Peter Castle Hill. This last is one of the smallest churches in the country, with a nave measuring just 25 feet by 16 feet. Originally much larger, the church was largely demolished in 1781 and rebuilt in its present diminished state using the old materials, including flint rubble and Roman bricks. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, always known as the Round Church, is one of only five surviving circular churches in England.

Hobson Street remembers the 16^th century benefactor (he brought fresh water to the city) and sometime Mayor of Cambridge Thomas Hobson. He ran a horse-hire business and hired out the horses in strict rotation; customers could only choose the horse nearest the stable door - hence the expression Hobson's Choice, meaning no choice at all. Hobson's Choice is the name of a 1915 play by Harold Brighouse, filmed in 1953 with Charles Laughton and John Mills. It is also the title of a ballet by David Bintley.