The Cambridge printA Cambridge print in a pale oak frame, on a chalk white wall, in soft flat daylight.0.707

Maps · Collection 01

Cambridge print, drawn from the real map

52.2053°N / 0.1218°E · United Kingdom

Most of this sheet is empty ground, and that is the point: meadows that were never built on, and a town that has spent eight hundred years not building on them.

You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.

Compose my Cambridge print

What the map shows

A town in a ring of meadows, and a river through it

The river makes a loop around the western side of the centre, and everything reads outward from it: inside, the compact medieval core around its market; on the far bank, the college lawns known as the Backs. North and south, the commons run right up against the built streets with no suburban fringe: the edge of the town is a clean line, not a fade. The ground is flat, this being the edge of the fen, apart from Castle Hill in the north where the castle stood.

Read on

Those calm, ornamental reaches are probably not natural: college archives suggest the Cam there was straightened and widened as a working channel before the colleges arrived, cut to bring barges up to the mills, and without even a towpath. The most pastoral view in England is an industrial canal that outlived its industry. And do not look for a campus: the colleges are scattered through the town, and the centre belongs as much to the market as to the university.

Compose your own

What suits Cambridge

The palette

Commit to the green. It is the dominant colour here and holding back on it would produce a print of nowhere in particular: let the commons, the Backs and the fens read as one pale continuous sheet, and let the old core sit on it as a compact grey, slightly warm, almost pink. Keep the Cam a thin line but an unbroken one, because the eye follows it round the whole loop. The station road in the south-east is the only frankly straight axis on the sheet; treat it as punctuation, not structure.

The framing

Vertical and near square, with the old core a little to the right so the loop of the Cam has room on the left, Castle Hill at the top and the southern commons at the bottom. The station lies further out to the south-east than this framing reaches, and going to fetch it pushes the river to the edge and breaks the ring of open ground, which is the whole subject. Its distance is honest anyway: the railway was kept at arm’s length here, and the university was not enthusiastic about its arrival. Nothing on this map wants enlarging. The scale of the place is a meadow and a college court.

The caption

The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. A college, a common, a date: that line is what turns a plan of Cambridge into your plan of Cambridge.

What the drawing tells

Three dates that explain the city

875The town is named after its bridge

A bridge over the Cam, or Granta, has stood here since at least 875, and the town took its name from it. It was already a trading place before the Domesday survey of 1086, by which time there was a castle on the high ground north of the bridge and the bulk of the houses on the south side. That division is still legible: the northern rise is thin and quiet, the southern side is where the town thickened, and the crossing between them is why anything is here at all.

1209The university arrived as refugees

In 1209, after clerks were hanged at Oxford, scholars fled and some of them settled in this fen market town. They had a chancellor by 1226 and the protection of Henry III by 1231. Nothing about the site invited a university: it was a river port for the East Midlands trade, with famous medieval fairs, one of which is still held on Midsummer Common. The institution that would eventually shape the whole map came here because it had to leave somewhere else.

1284Then the colleges lined up along the water

Peterhouse, the first college, was founded in 1284, and the pattern it began is the one you can see: buildings set in a row along the river with their ground running down to it. Henry VI laid the foundation stone of King’s College Chapel in 1446, St John’s followed in 1511 and Trinity in 1546. There are thirty-one colleges today, scattered through the town rather than gathered in one place, which is why the map has no single institutional block and yet feels organised all the way through.

Before ordering

The four questions people ask

Can I choose any place, any date?

Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.

What sizes do you offer?

From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.

What materials do you offer?

Four, from the barest to the most dressed.

Matte fine art paperA 200 gsm art paper with a deep matte finish: the bare print, to frame as you please.
Wooden hangersThe print suspended between two wooden hangers, ready to hang, in the spirit of studio posters.
The classic frameThe print mounted under acrylic glass in a slim frame, assembled by hand, delivered ready to hang.
Framed canvasThe piece printed on canvas, stretched over a wooden stretcher bar and set in a frame: a gallery presence.

How long does it take?

Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.

Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.

All the questions

Your Cambridge

The path across the common you took in all weathers, the bridge you always stopped on, the gate that was only open in term. The meadows are the same for everyone. The way you crossed them is not.

Compose my Cambridge print