Cambridge could become a victim of its own success

Cambridge has a problem. The great university city is chocabloc: chocabloc with new inventions, new home-grown ground-breaking companies, new offshoots of Apple and Amazon, flashy new boutique hotels and new people flooding in from around the region and all around the world to work.

The upshot is that Cambridge is growing faster than anywhere else in the country. It has one of the highest employment levels in the UK, some of the highest average salaries and productivity levels.

You could say it’s a nice problem to have. Yet there is a downside. The city is also chocolabloc with cars, the traffic congestion on all the main arteries in and out of the town is as clogged as Piccadilly Circus on a normal day, house prices are on a par with some of London’s most exclusive streets and local schools are bursting.

As one university student said on a recent 5 Live Breakfast show, “Cambridge is essentially a suburb of London”. The student was replying to a question about why Cambridge people had voted in such high numbers for Remain: the vote was 70%.

Yet his answer touched a raw nerve with the locals, and caused an uproar, because it perfectly described what terrifies so many. That the city’s ivory towers are in danger of melting, that smarty-pants international business men and women – and Chinese property investors – are snaffling up properties at such a rate that no local-born resident will ever be able to afford a house again. And that the century-old divide between town and gown is now between the new tycoons and the town.

Luckily, the Fen’s elders appear to be on the ball. They know better than anyone that this Silicon Valley of the Fens is expanding so rapidly that unless something is radically done to cope with “peak Cambridge”, the city’s stunning growth will be snuffed out.

As one leading entrepreneur says: “If we are not careful, we will be a victim of our own success, gobbled up by our own prowess”. Indeed, all the local economic forecasting predicts that “peak Cambridge” will begin to collapse in the mid-2020s. This is because employers will not be able to find enough people to fill the jobs available as workers will not put up with the long commutes or pay the high rents. Unless this bubble is burst, the elders know that people will start to leave or will not want to come.

As you would also expect – and hope of Cambridge – its business leaders are not hanging around waiting for that downturn. In the last few days, the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough combined authority has come up with a report recommending a new £4bn metro system that will include two underground stations in the city centre. The tram system – which would be Britain’s first battery-powered trackless tram – would use a cross between a tram and a bus to run from surrounding towns and suburbs into the city on a segregated route: a similar system opened two years ago in Zhuzhou, China.

It’s hoped that work on the Cambridgeshire Autonomous Metro, to be funded through local housing developers and central government, will start in little over two years, and be finished by 2029.

No one can wait that long. That’s why the authorities are also looking at building a pop-up railway station to stop at Addenbrooke’s hospital, now the site of the BioMedical Campus, and fast becoming one of the worlds most concentrated medical and scientific centres.

This is where Astra Zeneca is finishing off its global research headquarters, a stone’s throw from the new Papworth Hospital, the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cancer UK and, of course, the Genome Centre just down the road.

The pop-up station is being considered because the new South station – Cambridge North opened a few years ago – will not be ready for another few years.

In the scale and speed of its expansion, Cambridge can be compared to the growth of our great Victorian cities. Just imagine it: three railway stations catering for a city of 130,000 people.

But getting people in and out of the city is the top priority and the elephant in the room for Cambridge Ahead, the local business group, which sponsored the Cambridge Futures Project to look at the best ways the city should handle its growth.

The project was led by Dr Ying Jin, leader of the Cities and Transport Research Group at Cambridge University’s Department of Architecture. Dr Jin came up with four alternative strategies which might help control the growth and, critically, also help spread the city’s “bonfire economy” throughout the region.

The four approaches are all quite different and include densification, wider fringes, dispersal and wider transport corridors. All four models have been drawn from looking at other university cities around the world, and how they have managed growth. For example, Lund in Sweden went for densification along a new tramline; while Heidelberg has expanded its suburban fringes. In Silicon Valley, the expansion in California between Stanford University at Palo Alto and San Jose has attracted jobs from San Francisco.

Time is of the essence. As Matthew Bullock, master of St Edmund’s College, who led the Cambridge Ahead project, recently said: “It’s important that we start to move this forward and for politicians to get to the point where they’ve had a dialogue with the population and we make some decisions because the gap gets wider every year”.

And the gap is something that needs keeping close if Cambridge is to continue to flourish. It’s at the heart of why the city is so successful: keeping the brains and the know-how, and indeed, the spirit close by. When I asked one professor at the Judge Business School some years ago the secret to the city’s success, he said simply: “Everyone you need is only two phone calls away.”

Maggie Pagano,
Executive Editor,
Reaction