A Crawl of Classic Cambridge Pubs
‘... still known as “the Beer Quarter”, and there’s a well-worn crawl of classic pubs with some great beer for you to savour’
King’s College Chapel. Punting on the Cam. Strawberry Fair. These are the images that make Cambridge one of Britain’s top tourist hotspots.
But it’s not all floating dreamily down the river as the colleges slip lazily by. Cambridge also has its sprawling acres of narrow Victorian terraces, built after the railway arrived as infill between the station and the old town – and well-provided with street-corner locals.
In many such quarters the pubs have mostly been swept away by licensing reform, the Luftwaffe, and waves of town planners. Here though, an influx in the 1960s of postgraduates, research fellows, and all the other lower-paid denizens of Academe ensured that most of the pubs survived, and that many of them continued to serve traditional beer.
Even now, South Cambridge is still known as “the Beer Quarter”, and there’s a well-worn crawl of classic pubs with some great beer for you to savour. Let’s assume you’re not driving, and start at the station.
Walk up Station Road, and turn right into Tenison Road. A quarter of a mile up, on the corner of Wilkins Street, is the Salisbury Arms, originally built as a hotel with letting rooms at the back. Then in 1976 the ceiling was ripped out to create a high-ceilinged concert room, whose false minstrels’ gallery is home to a pair of mannequins posed at a table.
Walk up Wilkins Road and turn right into Mawson Road, and on your left is the Live & Let Live. As pleasantly scruffy and lived-in as the favourite trainers you can’t throw away (but not as smelly), the Live & Let Live is in the middle of a terrace dating from around 1870. Its single long, narrow bar has match-boarded walls, fixed wooden benches, bare floorboards, a wood-burning stove and, somewhat anachronistically, a beamed ceiling. Just the right surroundings for a beer range that boasts seven handpumps, a rare draught Belgian beer, a farmhouse cider, and a choice of 40 bottled Belgian beers. There’s also a tiny snug at the back for those truly intimate evenings.
Continue along Mawson Road, turn right into Mill Road and left into Kingston Road for the Kingston Arms. The pub may look olde-worlde from outside (despite the bright blue frontage), but inside it’s nothing of the sort. Check the shocking blue-green upholstery on the benches in the big L-shaped bar and the free internet access, but note also the open fire that says traditional comfort and cosiness. The garden’s cosy too – it’s heated and even boasts a sofa! Try out a range of cask beers that includes three Champion Beer of Britain competition, as well as a dark mild and a cask stout as regulars, along with five guest ales and a farmhouse cider. The food offering includes sausages from a local butcher and, for the fat-conscious, ostrich steaks.
Turn left out of the pub, left again along Hooper Street, and then right into Gwydir Street for the Cambridge Blue. The Dew Drop until the 1980s, it may not look much from the outside, but step inside and the first thing you see is a chiller cabinet full of mind-blowingly strong Belgian bottled beers. Once at the bar you’re faced with a thicket of handpumps from which up to 14 real ales are dispensed. Only two of them are regulars. The rest come mainly from microbreweries from all over Britain. And on top of that, the pub also stocks up to three farm ciders and even that rarity of rarities, a perry.
Unusually in such a location, there’s a lovely big garden at the back which has, so the staff say, more tables and chairs than the bar does.
To return to the station, head back down Gwydir Street, cross Mill Road into St Barnabas Street, and follow it back down to Station Road. If, on the other hand, four terrific real ale pubs aren’t enough for you there’s another great crawl in the rather more picturesque terraces of east Cambridge. But that’s for another time.
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