HABITORIALS // ISSUE 0

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Trumpington THE BLUEPRINT FOR AN AWARD WINNING COMMUNITY? A Visitor’s Reflection by Cecilie Sachs Olsen

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As a place to live, this has everything Carol Holloway 14

IT’S LIKE BEING IN HEAVEN Tatenda Mukumbira

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Location, Location, Location…

Sam Cooke 26

ONE YEAR IN TRUMPINGTON: LIVING THE ECO DREAM Lorna & Dave Rayner

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Trumpington Through Time Stephen & Shirley Brown 38

THIS IS OUR “FOREVER HOME” Catherine Wallace

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Trumpington Treasures Steve & Sam Harris 50

THE BEST OF ALL WORLDS David Plank & Jen Runham

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Is this Trumpington’s Time?

A Writer’s Afterthought by Vicky Anning 62

FROM SHOW HOME to Public Home A Farewell from the Residents in Residence

Trumpington

D R A W A N A R O F T IN R P E U L THE B WINNING COMMUNITY? A Visitor’s Reflection by Cecilie Sachs Olsen Habitorials invited Cecilie Sachs Olsen to visit Trumpington for an afternoon and respond with her initial impressions.

Cecilie is a researcher in Geography at Queen Mary, University of London with an interest in socially engaged arts practice, space and politics.

When asked by Habitorials if I would like to visit Trumpington in order to write an article about what is branded as ‘a multiple award winning new community’, I was quite excited about the idea. I had never been to an award winning community before. What would it be like? A nostalgic image, sold to me by big corporations like Disney or the delusion of a perfect life central to the film The Truman Show, gave me certain expectations: A sunny street with open front porches. Neighbours greeting neighbours. Kids running in and out of each other’s houses. Porch swings providing easy refuge from the cares of the day. The title melody from Cheers – the American sitcom – as the perfect soundtrack: ‘Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your na-a-ame, and they’re always glad you ca-a-ame….’

However, recent years have seen an awful lot of handwringing about the idea of community. Govern­ ments, think tanks and columnists alike have moaned about the loss of community and what can be done to restore it. Had Trumpington found the recipe? Could its new development teach us how to make an awardwinning community?

As I arrive in Trumpington on a grey January morning I am greeted by ponderous construction works and numerous builders, that are not showing any signs of being glad I ca-a-ame. They’re hasting around like busy bees in their identical neon-yellow uniforms.

The billboards that cover the hoardings provide me with blueprints of the award-winning community that is being built here: images depicting a sunny place with people of different ages and cultures happily enjoying the streets and green areas. There are no front porches, but the harmonic Disney vibe is definitely present. The projections make me think about some­ thing the urban theorist Henri Lefebvre once said: ‘what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is that architects erect a structure in the imagination before realizing it in material form’.

However, while Lefebvre was emphasising that the future cannot be constructed in some fantastic utopian mould, but depends on the tangible raw materials of the present, the architects of Great Kneighton, Trumpington’s new development, seemed to have been able to design an award-winning community even before anyone was living there. As one ad for Great Kneighton reads: ‘Located within the ultimate urban village, Great Kneighton incorporates the facilities essential to daily life to create a sustainable, compact and vibrant mixed-use community offering an exceptional quality of life.’ The relationship between a good community and built urban form is here

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collective living. Maybe it should be re-named the Slow Home, I wonder as I ponder about how a home is slowly formed alongside the pencil marks on the kitchen wall measuring the children’s height in years.

It is time to leave the Slow Home; my guide wants to show me the spot that the developers have designated ‘proposed community gardens’. As I navigate through the construction sites that populate the road on the way to the gardens, I think about how the areas in which we live contain the past like the lines of a hand, providing a sense of orientation and belonging. In new developments like Great Kneighton or Trumpington Meadows these lines are only just becoming visible.

It takes time and several walking feet to mark a convenient path across the grass by the street corner.

But when a short cut like this is made, it manifests a sense of collective identity and community that brings us closer to the crowd: we all decided to cut across the grass rather than sticking to the pavement.

Although, I may not share interests or life-style with the people that have walked the path before me, we have something important in common: we appropriate this space together. Together our footprints make a new short cut to the guided busway. Together our hands rub handrails naked of paint warning that the staircase can be steep and slippery. Together our chewing gums are complicit in infringement as they decorate the underside of a bench. Together our trash bears witness to the perfect sunny spot to have a picnic. Needs,

warnings and desires are expressed through these marks of living. Sometimes the marks lead to more formal manifestations and initiatives such as a paved lane where the shortcut used to be, or the creation of a community garden at the sunny picnic spot.

Here in Great Kneighton the community garden was, I learn, proposed before any marks of living called for its creation. However, the community garden itself was not pre-designed, the space is left open for the residents to develop as they wish. And, indeed, the ad-hoc assemblage of wooden tables and benches located in the barren field of grass tell me that some form of communal initiative has taken place here.

My guide confirms: in October new and old residents shared a meal in the garden, discussing possibilities, potentials and wishes for what the garden could be like. Time will show whether more meals like these will flourish when the weather gets more hospitable, and whether the space will turn into a community garden or something else completely. It is exciting that the proposed community garden is left empty and open, in contrast to the Show Home that initially projected a very specific form of living. I imagine all kinds of things that can develop in the garden over time; chess-clubs, pumpkin competitions, table-tennis tournaments, hip-hop parties, farmers markets…

A construction worker in his neon-yellow west and helmet awakes me from my reverie. I am blocking the

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way for a bulldozer and have to move. For a moment I stop to observe the impressive building works that surrounds me. The busy builders remind me of the story of Thekla – a city that is under constant construction. When the traveller asks the residents why the construction of Thekla takes such a long time, they answer that if they stop, they fear that not only the buildings, but the whole community will crumble and fall into pieces. Thekla and its residents are one organism in which the fates of individuals are linked. The people know that what is good for Thekla is good for them and so everyone works together to keep the city alive. Thekla is a building site; it is not a finished structure designed for a particular lifestyle.

In similar vein, a community is produced through its members in a process that requires constant work.

A community is never finished and can therefore not exist as a product independent of the people that it is made of. The construction of Trumpington, then, does not solely rely on the developers, the architects, or the construction workers. It relies on the residents – old and new – who occupy and leave their marks on the area. No master plan or advertisement can determine or predict what will be award winning or successful about this form of construction work. All we know is that the possibilities are endless. When the traveller asks the residents of Thekla where the plan or blueprint for their construction is, they point to the stars. ‘There is the blueprint,’ they say.

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Name Tatenda Mukumbira Age 17 (18 in March 2016) Lives Spring Drive, Trumpington Meadows Moved to Trumpington in December 2012 Type of housing 3-bedroom terraced house, finished in 2012, rented from housing association Current rent paid £165 per week Current value 2, 3 & 4 bedroom houses on the Trumpington Meadows development are being advertised from £429,995 to £649,995 on Barratt’s website Favourite place in Trumpington “I love the parks because I love the fresh air I get when I’m out. The atmosphere helps me think up great ideas and I love playing with the kids or watching them play when I take my brother and sister out. It’s always full of excitement and laughter. Even in the horrible winter weather, it never loses its warmth – and I think there’s some beauty in that.”

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Tatenda Mukumbira

IT’S LIKE BEING IN HEAVEN

Tatenda Mukumbira has been on quite a journey over the last 17 years.

And you get the distinct impression that her adventures are only just beginning…

Grinning from ear to ear with the sunniest smile you’re ever likely to see, Tatenda (who’s about to celebrate her 18th birthday) recounts the tale of how she ended up moving to Trumpington Meadows just over three years ago, with her dad, mum, sister and brother.

Sitting round the kitchen table over a mug of tea, she explains how she was raised by her gran in the bustling Zimbabwean capital of Harare. Her father, Stanley, had come over to the UK when she was threeyears-old and was working hard as a healthcare assistant to save up enough money for Tatenda to come and join him and his wife Nancy, who was training to be a nurse. That moment came five years ago, when Tatenda was 12 and her younger brother Leon had just been born.

She landed in suburban Sawston one chilly May day with no idea what to expect. She had never travelled outside Zimbabwe before, but as far as she was concerned it was all one huge adventure.

“It was just coming into summer, so that was nice,” she enthuses.

“But it was still a whole lot colder than Zimbabwe. And it was way too quiet! I was one of those people who just used to play out all the time, so it was a bit hard to adjust to.”

When she met her Year 7 form group at Sawston Village College, they were nearly at the end of their first year of secondary school and had already formed their friendship groups. But Tatenda remained undaunted.

Tatenda quickly made a new circle of friends. “I have a lot of people I know,” she says. “I have a lot of acquaintances and a small number of friends now. I like to keep a tight circle.”

“I am really a people person,” she says. “When I went to high school, I was introduced to people who were in my form and that was it. We were inseparable. I had a really good form group, so that helped.”

A new adventure…

When Tatenda talks about her family moving from their cramped twobedroom flat in Sawston to the more spacious three bedroom new build in Trumpington Meadows, she becomes even more animated than usual.

What also helped was Tatenda’s willingness to throw herself into school life. She had always loved singing, dancing and drama, but had never had the chance to have any drama lessons in Zimbabwe – so she joined the school drama club.

Within the first few weeks of arriving in England, she got up on stage in front of the whole school and sang a song from High School Musical. She went on to perform in other school productions too, including playing Queen Margaret in Richard III. Admittedly, she was homesick for Zimbabwe and her gran for the first few weeks – and she missed the gregarious lifestyle she left behind in Harare. But she soon adjusted.

“Back in Harare, everyone knows everyone, everyone’s friends with everyone,” she explains. “But here everyone has their own little groups depending on what you’re interested in and your personality type. So that was weird. But I kind of got used to it.”

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“We’d been looking for ages and these houses came up and we snapped one up,” she says. “I think it was the space – there was quite a lot of space. And the distance from everywhere else – it’s 15 minutes away from town, it was 15 minutes away from my school at the time in Sawston, it’s near the Park and Ride, there’s a Waitrose. Everything was quite close by. And obviously it’s ten minutes away from the hospital, where Mum works as a nurse.”

“It felt great to be moving into a brand new house,” she says. “It was a new adventure. I was really excited about meeting new people! It was the fact that I kind of had ownership of the place. We’d be the first people who came here and whoever came next would look up to us. We’d be there to help them round and everything – we’d be tour guides.”

Tatenda is as enthusiastic about her own street as she is about the location of Trumpington Meadows, a 1,200 housing development boasting 40 percent affordable housing

(Tatenda’s family rents their threebedroom house from the housing association for around £165 a week).

The new apartments and houses – ranging from starter homes to luxury properties – nestle between Waitrose, the Trumpington Park and Ride and a 148-acre country park that stretches out towards the rolling fields of Grantchester and the picturesque 13th century Trumpington parish church.

The Trumpington Meadows site used to be home to the Plant Breeding Institute – which, after a brief spell as a prisoner of war camp during the 1940s – went on to produce household names such as the Maris Piper potato. The institute was sold on to Unilever and briefly to Monsanto before the land was bought in 2004 by the Grosvenor property group and the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) – one of the UK’s largest private pension schemes.

“I quite like the layout of the area where we live,” says Tatenda.

“Compared to the houses by the marketing suite, it’s like walking into a completely new world. That area is quite dark and mysterious.

I don’t like it. But over here, it’s like being in heaven. You should see it when it’s sunny. It’s so nice. All the greenery – most of the stuff is fake – but it’s quite nice to look at.”

Tatenda – whose name means “we are grateful” – is equally enthusiastic as she gives a guided tour of her family home, which boasts eco features including solar panels that are standard in many of Trumpington Meadows’ new builds (the houses have all been designed and built to comply with Level 3 of

the Code for Sustainable Homes).

She practically bursts with pride as she shows off the compact garden and the view from the small balcony, which is somewhat overshadowed by the corrugated silver roof of the John Lewis depot. She loves the kingfisher blue of the family bathroom. She loves the spacious kitchen where her family gathers for meals. And she particularly appreciates her own sparsely furnished bedroom, complete with boy band posters and cuddly toys. She planned to paint the walls turquoise but they ended up bright green. “I didn’t think it would be so bright!” she shrugs.

“ It felt great to be moving into a brand new house.

It was a new adventure. I was really excited about meeting new people!”

Tatenda has also been exploring the Trumpington Meadows Country Park, since it opened up its criss-crossing pathways that lead down to the River Cam and Byron’s Pool – where the poet Lord Byron allegedly swam 200 years ago.

“Near the back of the school, there’s a forest,” she says. “In summer, we went jogging and on family bike rides. It was quite fun.”

So how does her new home in Trumpington Meadows compare to the community where she grew up in Harare?

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“I lived in a fairly modern bungalow,” says Tatenda. “It had four bedrooms and a bathroom, with a toilet and a shower next to it. We had a big garden with sugar cane, green veggies, two mango trees and a peach tree. And we also had a cottage in our yard that we rented out. There were two verandas around the house where we used to sit out…”

“It was never grey and it was always quite sunny and warm,” she remembers wistfully. “There were a lot of pigeons coming to our house. So my granddad put a little bird house and put food in and everything for them. But then he also took some and cooked them!”

It used to annoy Tatenda when she first arrived in England that people thought she grew up in a mud hut because she came from Africa.

But in fact she lived in a middle class neighbourhood where she could walk to school and to the shops, just as she can in Trumpington Meadows.

“The first thing people asked me when I came here was, ‘did you live in a tribe?’And I was like, ‘No. I didn’t live in a tribe, I didn’t wear an animal skin or anything like that.’ I made sure that everyone understood that living in Africa didn’t mean that you grew up in a mud hut wearing an animal skin.

They were quite surprised. ‘You mean you lived in a normal house?’

And I was like, ‘yes, I did’.”

“Everyone here is quite civilised” Although there aren’t many people of Tatenda’s age living on the new development, she’s made a couple of new friends since she moved here three years ago. One of them is her next door neighbour and another

lives near one of the neighbourhood parks where she loves taking her five-year-old brother Leon out to play when the weather’s decent.

“Everyone who’s here does make an effort to say hi and interact with everyone else,” she says. “I know quite a lot of people here because of the school and everything. Everyone who does live here is quite nice. And I guess that harmony is nice.”

“Everyone here is quite civilised,” she adds with a grin.

Her brother and sister – who were both born in the UK – have made lots of new friends too going to the newly opened Trumpington Meadows primary school. Twelveyear-old Chantelle has just gone up to the new Trumpington Community College, which builders are due to complete later this year (pupils are being bussed to Parkside Community College in Cambridge in the meantime). But in spite of all the new friendships the family has formed, Tatenda still finds English people a bit reserved.

“ Everyone who’s here does make an effort to say hi and interact with everyone else.”

“We’re quite lucky here because both my neighbours here are quite talkative,” she says. “It was kind of the same in Sawston. But people like staying in their own little clusters, in their own little bubble. Back in Harare, I lived in people’s houses.

I literally spent so much time in people’s houses I didn’t need to

knock when I went to my friend’s houses. I just walked through the door and said, ‘hi, I’ve come’.”

about a girl who got amnesia and the whole story was about how she got to that point.”

“When my friends come here, they’re quite reserved,” she adds. “They’re really awkward being in my house.

And I’m like, chill, I’m not going to eat you or anything, you know! I’m really comfortable going to people’s houses and I can make myself feel at home.”

“I’ve always been on top of my work,” she says. “But I wouldn’t be at home reading a book. I’d be outside playing with my friends.”

“My personality kind of changed when I moved,” she admits. “You kind of adjust to the way people are.

I’m really one of these people who are in your face and it intimidates people. A lot of people talk about how they find it strange that I’m so confident. And I’m like, ‘I’m sorry’!”

Since Tatenda moved to England, she has become an avid reader and has started writing short stories too.

“To begin with I never even liked reading or writing or anything related to books. My parents said, you’re always watching TV. Why don’t you grab a book? So I ran upstairs and grabbed a book and I really liked it and I was like, ‘what have I been doing with my life’?”

When she was in Year 9 or 10, she did some creative writing in English.

And she loved it.

“I was just starting, I was a rookie then,” she blushes. Today she publishes her own edgy fiction on a website called Wattpad, which is popular among up-and-coming young writers.

“I like looking at complex ideas that normal young adult books don’t look at,” she says. “My first story was

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“I’d probably be doing something different if I’d stayed [in Harare],” she says. “Reading and writing was never my thing back then. I don’t know what I’d be doing, but definitely not that.”

New pastures…

Today Tatenda is studying for her A-levels at Long Road Sixth Form College. She is taking psychology and health & social care and hopes to do a degree at Oxford Brookes University with the aim of becoming a child mental health nurse.

“I grew up around kids, I love kids,” she says. “Originally I wanted to be a child nurse but then I took psychology for my A-levels and it really intrigued me. I want to do both but I thought that was too many years in university so I found a course that combined both.”

She’s not sure if she would have enjoyed the same kind of opportunities if she’d stayed on at secondary school in Harare.

“Back there you’d have to pay for education,” she says. “And if you don’t pay for the term, then basically you don’t go to school. But here obviously everything is quite free.

Education is free up until you go to university and even then you still get bursaries and stuff like that.”

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One thing that has surprised Tatenda is the different attitude towards discipline and learning in English schools.

“The biggest difference is the punishment for not doing homework or not doing work,” she says.

“Here you have detention and all that. There they don’t really do detentions. You get a beating for not doing your work.”

“One of my teachers was a perfectionist,” she says.“When she was marking your work, she’d have you standing next to her. She’d mark your work with one hand and in the other hand, she would have a pen. For every spelling mistake you made, you got a pinch with the pen.”

Although she’s not an advocate of corporal punishment, Tatenda thinks there’s something to be said for showing kids the consequences of their actions as they’re growing up.

“People kind of think if there’s no consequence for your actions then what’s the point,” she says.

“I went to school with a couple of people who got pregnant by the time we were doing our GCSEs – or

didn’t make it to GCSEs,” she says.

“It was because they have it all, kind of thing.”

“If you grow up with not as many opportunities, you want to strive to get the most out of life,” she says.

“If you grow up with it all there, you don’t really feel the need to work harder because you know you can get it without having to try hard.”

“ If you grow up with not as many opportunities, you want to strive to get the most out of life.”

You certainly can’t accuse Tatenda of not trying hard. She seems to throw herself 100 percent into everything she does. When she’s not studying or looking after her younger brother and sister, you can find her volunteering at Addenbrooke’s Hospital – serving tea and chatting to the elderly patients.

“Every time I go there I get to meet somebody new and they always have so many stories to tell. And it’s always so fun.”

You get the feeling that Tatenda is really going places. She doesn’t plan to return to Zimbabwe anytime soon.

Or to stay in Trumpington either.

She harbours a secret ambition to audition for X Factor one day. And she longs to spread her wings and explore the world.

“I’m kind of branching outwards,” she says. “I want to travel. I’ll finish my studies then I’ll travel a bit – anywhere and everywhere. Growing up I always wanted to go to Rome or Greece. But then I discovered Dubai, and I thought ‘wow’. Then I discovered Australia and I thought ‘oh my God’. And then there’s New York and California… and everywhere. I can’t decide.”

Wherever Tatenda ends up, you have the feeling that she will be bringing her own sunshine with her…

“What I love is talking to different people all the time,” she says.

EXCERPT FROM “JUST MY LUCK” BY TATENDA “Books were my life source. I lived and breathed books.

From science fiction, thrillers, even teenage drama, I read everything. Reading for me was like being transported to another world. I merge my soul with the character, feeling what they feel, experiencing life in their eyes and struggling with them in hard times.

That’s when I truly feel at home.”

You can read more of Tatenda’s fiction on Wattpad here: https://www.wattpad.com/user/tate2mitchie

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Name Sam Cooke Age 37 Lives Bishops Road Moved to Trumpington 2008 Type of housing 3-bedroom semi-detached house, built in 1937 Current value Houses on Bishops Road have a current average value of £432,257, according to Zoopla Favourite place in Trumpington “My favourite place in Trumpington is the Cooke Curtis & Co office. Obviously. The reason we liked this location on Trumpington High Street was because everyone knew where the Hobby Shop was. It’s a bit of a shame it closed down, because it was such a landmark, which is why we’ve kept the sign…

But we didn’t feel like we were taking away a valuable village resource that could have been something great for the community.”

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Sam Cooke

, n o i t a c o L , n o i Locat

Location…

As you head along Trumpington High Street towards Cambridge, you may have spotted two subtle changes in the last 12 months. On the right hand side, the old watering hole, the Tally Ho pub, has been spruced up into a gastro pub and has changed its name to the Hudson’s Ale House.

And just across the road, the model shop that had been a firm fixture in Trumpington since 1985 has closed its doors to the public and reopened last February as a trendy looking estate agent’s called Cooke Curtis & Co. We talked to one half of the Cooke Curtis duo – Sam Cooke – who has worked as an estate agent in this area since he was 19 and has lived in Trumpington for the past eight years with his wife and three young kids.

We wanted to know whether these changes were a sign of Trumpington’s changing demographics? We wanted to understand why Trumpington has become such a property hotspot – with house prices rising more than 20% over the last 12 months (the average house price in the area is now more than £348,000 – which is twice the national average). And most of all, we wanted to get to the bottom of why Trumpington has become such a desirable place to live, even attracting the attention of the TV show Location, Location, Location last summer (Sam and his business partner Jamie Curtis persuaded two first-time buyers – young doctors working at Addenbrooke’s Hospital – to buy a 1960s fixer upper on Beverley Way with a stairlift for the princely sum of £350,000).

First, why is the price of houses in Trumpington going up and up when there are so many new houses being built?

“Supply and demand is all that matters,” explains Sam. “There are thousands of new houses being built in Trumpington – so there’s a big rise in supply, but the rise in demand is bigger. We have more jobs than that coming to the area. These little hubs work together. We’ve seen it with one of the big biotech firms AstraZeneca moving from Cheshire down here. The university is building more and more accommodation for students and they’re widening their catchment.

Cambridge University has been massively expanding its postgraduate programme. And all these people need somewhere to live.

There have been lots of flats, lots of terraces and lots of houses with modest gardens built in Trumpington.

We haven’t built anything like that in the 35 years before that. So there’s this huge gap in the Cambridge market. In terms of choice, our housing stock is dreadful. There are very few nice family houses with big gardens. (Well, there are, but they cost £1.2 million!)

It’s easy to say in hindsight, but what they should have done is build more over the last 100 years, slowly.

They’ve suddenly realised we need more houses. And I think it’s right that they should build them where people can walk or cycle to town so they don’t make the traffic worse.

The reason you buy in Trumpington is usually the practicalities – you need to be able to cycle to town, you need to be able to get your kids to school, you need to be able to get to the M11…”

So what kind of people are moving into Trumpington these days?

“It’s quite nicely varied actually,” says Sam. “We recently re-sold a two bedroom detached house on Abode [one of the new developments off Addenbrooke’s Road] that was just two years old. We had three people bidding on it. We had two young girls whose parents were buying for them to live in while they did their first year of medicine studies; the other bidders were people coming here from abroad to work in the hospital; the third bidders were a couple in their sixties who were downsizing from a big house in Cambridge and wanted something easy to run. He’s a Green Party activist so he wanted something that was efficient, eco-friendly and easy to run, something that was easy to lock up and leave without worrying about but that offered something interesting architecturally. So it’s nice because you’ve got young people who want it for doing their young people things; you’ve got professionals doing well for themselves, working at the hospital; and you’ve got Cambridge people too.

It is mainly professional people who are moving here – there are lots of researchers, lots of people working for biotech firms and lots of people working for the

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“ There’s a big rise in supply, but the rise in demand is bigger.” hospital or industries connected with it. That’s just the geography of it. The hospital is the largest employer within a mile of here.

You do get London commuters but it’s not as significant as it’s been made out to be. Cambridge has a multicultural, slightly artistic feel like bits of London do. And it has good schools, lovely architecture, it’s very safe and all that sort of thing. But London commuters certainly aren’t as big a group as the local workforce in terms of people looking to move to Trumpington.

And the buy-to-let investor thing is massively overstated. It makes a great soundbite. Certain estate agents and certain builders – when they build blocks of flats – have in the past travelled to other countries and pitched them as investments. But the majority of houses in Trumpington are owner occupiers.

There are lots of people from abroad who are buying here, but it’s often for their children who are at school here and they want to have a base here while their children are at school. Or their jobs brought them here.”

Has there been a noticeable change in the demographics in Trumpington then?

“When we sell the house on Foster Road for the working class person who’s owned it from new, it sells to a professional. We all know that Foster Rd/Byron Square used to be ex-local authority. The houses were lived in by generations of tradespeople. Now every one we sell to is doctor so and so and professor so and so.

So there is a shift in demographics because, sadly, we sold all the council houses off in the 80s. By the nature of that and how expensive houses are, there is that shift.

And then conversely, with the affordable houses that are coming along with the new builds, there are more lower income people that are coming into the area. It’s one of the wonderful things that, because of the requirement for affordable housing and because the City Council/ South Cambs have been quite good at upholding that, there are now affordable places for people to live.

People talk about how expensive the new houses are but 40% of the houses out there are ‘affordable’.

Trumpington has always been quite middle class. It’s an edge-of-the-city suburb, appealing to all kinds of different people. There are a lot more houses now, but the mix is the same.”

What does the average house cost in Trumpington?

“An average-to-good three bed semi would be in the £400ks. If you’re a young professional couple and you want to borrow that sort of money, you’ve got to be

earning £60k each. That’s serious money. There’s little around that’s cheaper than £350,000. That’s why it’s the professionals who are buying around here because realistically they’re the ones who can afford it.

Last year, we sold two semis on Foster Road within six months of each other. One sold for £375k and the other sold for £450k. People see a big house with a big back garden on a quiet road where you can walk to Addenbrooke’s in ten minutes and it’s relatively cheap.

The most expensive houses in Trumpington cost upwards of £2 million (including some of the new houses on the Aura and Halo developments off Long Road).

I genuinely don’t know where people on average salaries would live if it wasn’t for all the affordable stuff that’s been brought with the new developments. If I was still in my salaried job, I couldn’t get a mortgage for my house and I think there are loads of people in that situation.”

When did you move to Trumpington?

“I’ve only lived here for eight years. I grew up down the road in Stapleford. Mrs Cooke has lived here on and off for 34 years. She grew up on Shelford Road.

We bought our first house in Haverhill. This was 16/17 years ago. I was 19. At that age I looked around at what I could afford on my meagre salary. I looked at the cost of mortgages versus the cost of renting and I thought, ‘Blimey, let’s buy a house.’ I looked at Cambourne (that was just coming out of the ground) and a two-bed house was £120k and then I looked at Haverhill and a two-bedroom house was £60k. We did what a lot of people do and moved away from Cambridge because we couldn’t afford our first house here. Then our salaries got better, house prices moved and we moved back when we’d got a bit of equity.

I would have moved back to Stapleford. It’s quite peaceful. But my parents moved away and Annie has family connections here [Annie, Sam’s wife, who works as a childminder, is the daughter of former Cambridge Mayor Philippa Slatter]. We wanted a house that was not on the main road. At that time, there was only Bishops Road that worked for us. But actually having lived here, I do absolutely appreciate the practicalities. I look forward to not ferrying my kids about when they’re older!

If you move further out, you can get so much better value. If you go a bit further than Sawston or Foxton, you can buy a lovely big detached house with an acre of land for the price of a semi in Trumpington. Ten miles away and the world is your oyster. But I still live here for its practicalities.

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“ I think it will always have its own identity.”

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“ There are a lot more houses now, but the mix is the same.”

And it’s still a nice balance between feeling a bit urban, feeling a bit connected, feeling a part of our wonderful city. You feel like you’re a Cambridge citizen but you also feel far enough out that you get a bit more garden and it’s a bit less busy. It feels less urban but it doesn’t feel like suburban soulless sprawl like you get in big cities. It still feels like a little community.”

Has Trumpington changed as a place to live over the past eight years?

“I used to look out of my back window across fields but now I wave at my neighbours in the new houses instead! But I’ve got over it. If I was 65 and wanted a peaceful life, I might think differently.

I’ve got three children between four and nine. And they now have playgrounds to play in; they now have a secondary school that’s going to be within half a mile from our house rather than having to go five miles by bus to Sawston every day. They will now have a skate board park. They have a safe cycle route into the city along the guided busway. They have a much wider range of friends from all over the world and different social backgrounds that they can mix with.

OK, my view has gone but overall I think it’s been great for the area. I think everything that’s gone on is nothing but positive. There’s been so little Nimbyism.

The Trumpington Residents’ Association – which is the closest thing we have to a parish council – has embraced everything and have been very practical about it all.”

And has the community changed at all?

“Trumpington has become a place I want to live,” he says. “It always felt a bit like no man’s land – it wasn’t Cambridge and it wasn’t a village. I grew up in Stapleford – which is a very traditional village where you can walk everywhere and everyone knows each other. To me, Trumpington was two roads. But having lived here, I’ve realised that community does exist.

It’s just not immediately obvious as you’re driving through it. And we now have a cluster of houses rather than a ribbon of houses.

It’s like a lot of communities, until you live here you just don’t understand it. Because a community isn’t about the roads or how it feels as you go through it. It’s about what goes on behind it – the friends you make and how you engage with it.

secondary school in the city for 60 years. It’s quite different in terms of its architecture.

The existing schools – like Netherhall and Sawston – are very traditional. They’re very successful, good schools but this is something a bit different. There are no corridors, no staff rooms. It’s a very inclusive, intimate school all focused around a central atrium. And it’s going to be fairly small. When I was at Sawston, it had 250 pupils in a year. It never felt like a tight community.

It felt like a big sprawling school. The new school is going to have 90 pupils in each year. Everyone’s going to know each other. For a growing evolving community, that will be really a nice thing.

With the sporting facilities and things like evening classes at the school, you’ll now be able to walk or get on your bike and do evening classes, go and get a coffee and sit in the square afterwards. In my mind, it’s going to feel like a lovely little centre – I may be wrong, it may be that nobody goes there. But I have a romantic feeling about that being a part of a thriving centre.

All of this is driven by money making, one way or the other. The biotech companies don’t exist for the good of us. They exist because they want to earn millions of dollars. Builders market houses because they want to sell them well, but the end result is they do tend to build quite nice houses. So if you create a nice community and consider how people are going to live in it – specially with someone like Countryside who’s building over a five or seven year period – they want it to be positive.

And I think the City Council has been good at providing community facilities. When we get the hub – in the square with the shops, café, the secondary school – I think it’s going to work. It’s going to make this one community.”

Do you think Trumpington will lose its identity as it continues to grow?

“I think it will always have its own identity,” says Sam. “If I’m talking to a local person, I would never say ‘I live in Cambridge and my office is in Cambridge’.

I’d say ‘Trumpington’. The developers very specifically didn’t call the new development ‘Trumpington’, they called it ‘Great Kneighton’. But nobody calls it Great Kneighton. And I think that’s right. It shows the strength of Trumpington’s identity and history as a village.”

I think community is an important thing. Giving me and my family a sense of belonging here is very important.

That’s why I got involved as a governor at the new secondary school. It’s quite exciting! It’s the first new

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Name Lorna & Dave Rayner (Harry 5; Ebony, 2; Orla Rose, 1) Age 31 / 35 Live Lingrey Court, behind Anstey Way Moved to Trumpington in January 2015 (left in January 2016) Type of housing 4-bedroom, semi-detached eco-home, newly built Current value Around £550,000 Favourite place in Trumpington “Our favourite place in Trumpington is the park and field in the Foster Road estate – the children also love it too!”

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ONE YEAR IN G N I V I L : N O T G N I P TRUM AM THE ECO DRELorna & Dave Rayner The first night Lorna and Dave Rayner slept in their brand new state-of-theart eco-home behind the Bun Shop on Anstey Way, they felt as if they were staying in a posh hotel. They had arrived with just a suitcase full of clothes in the first week of January 2015. Lorna was heavily pregnant.

Their two young children were overnighting with their grandparents.

Their new house looked like a swanky show home. Downstairs, there was a dinner service laid out on the white laminate dining table in the immaculate open plan kitchen, a matching yellow toaster and kettle, shower gel in the bathroom, books on the bookshelves, tasteful furnishings straight out of a John Lewis catalogue, an “abundance” of vases and even two beers for the couple to quaff.

“It all looked lovely,” recalls 35-yearold Dave. “But we had to child proof the house! We had to move everything up!”

This fantastically airy and fullyfurnished four-bedroom, threestorey ‘zero carbon concept home’ couldn’t have been a bigger contrast from the dark and dreary 1950s bungalow the couple and their two pre-schoolers had been renting in Burwell for the past three years.

“It was an old person’s bungalow that hadn’t been decorated,” says Lorna. “It still had the original kitchen. None of the windows really sealed so it was chilly in winter and it was really expensive to heat. There was no heating in the bathroom. It was all very dark as well. You walked into this big dark

hallway with doors all around it.

It was all dark laminate wood on the doors.”

Lorna and Dave had been paying out £700 a month in rent and were desperately trying to save enough money for a deposit to buy their own home. But with two under fives and another baby on the way, it was hard to save much more than a £100 a month on Dave’s salary as a swimming development manager and Lorna’s part-time earnings from working in her parents’ pub and as a swimming teacher.

Then Lorna spotted an advert in the local paper looking for a family to “Live rent-free for a year”. She practically jumped at the opportunity.

“I started dreaming about all this money I could save, so I decided to enter,” says 31-year-old Lorna.

“You had to collect five vouchers and write 150 words about why you could be Cambridge’s family of the future. I don’t think I wrote anything profound. I just wrote about who we were. That we liked being outdoors and growing our own veg.

Normal stuff really.”

A few weeks later, Lorna – who describes herself as “eco-conscious” rather than an “eco-warrior” – got a phone call and had a telephone interview with a PR company working for the housing developer Hill. It was when the powersthat-be at Hill invited Lorna and Dave to a face-to-face interview that suddenly everything began

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to feel a bit more real! Lorna had mentioned the competition to her husband in passing when she first saw the ad, but he hadn’t really taken it too seriously. She had gone ahead and entered without telling anyone. And now the couple and their two kids (Harry, aged four, and Ebony, aged one at the time) were being invited to Hill’s offices near Cambridge station as one of four shortlisted families. When Lorna started to research property prices in Trumpington and saw that fourbedroom properties were going for about £900,000, she started to feel a bit out of her depth.

“We turned up at Hill’s office but we had no idea who we were going to meet – we were worried that they would be really posh and we were just normal,” she recalls, after scrubbing up her children and bringing out their Sunday best clothes. “We sat and had a chat with them and they were really nice. But Harry and Ebony started to get bored after about 20 minutes and started to tear around.”

Dave adds: “I remember walking out and saying to Lorna, ‘Well, if they want a real family then you can’t get much more real. We haven’t hidden anything.’”

The next day, the Rayners got a phone call to say they had won.

They couldn’t quite believe their luck. Just ten weeks later, they had the keys to the new house where they were going to be living rentand bill-free for the next 12 months.

“ …the idea of the house is so

o ec an in ve li n ca le p eo p al m or n

way without too much effort.”

“It was really surreal,” says Lorna.

“After we’d found out we won, we drove up at the weekend and had a look around the area. It was very much a building site. The boards were still up. But when we actually picked up the keys in January and walked into the house, I was speechless. It was amazing!”

Eco experiment The Rayners’ good fortune was thanks to a competition run by Hill in conjunction with the Cambridge News as part of a study to see how everyday families adapt to cuttingedge sustainable technologies.

Built to one of the highest levels of sustainability in the UK (Level 5 out of a possible 6), the concept house was built along the German Passivhaus (passive house) principle.

The house is designed to be airtight so that no heat can escape naturally, so it needs far less heating than older houses. It boasts a heat recovery ventilation system that pumps warm air out and brings clean cool air into the building, thick wall insulation, solar panels on the roof generating electricity, a rainwater harvesting system to flush the toilets, a green roof, triple-glazed windows and even a charging point for electric cars on the front driveway. It’s twinned with a matching wooden-clad house next door, using sustainablysourced building materials. This neighbouring house is owned by Cambridge City Council and is currently home to a family with five school-aged children, whose energy use is also being monitored.

The two box-shaped, three-storey houses with their brightly painted green and blue doors tower

above the low rise council-owned bungalows and flats that are tucked away behind Anstey Way’s row of shops, where there used to be a space for drying laundry that had fallen into disrepair.

But there is a point behind the unusual experiment.

The shiny new concept house was unveiled as Hill was finalising plans for one of the UK’s largest zero carbon developments on Cambridge City Council land between the guided busway and the post-war council houses along Foster Road. The Virido housing development – Virido means “to become green” in Latin – will include 208 zero carbon houses (also built to Level 5 of the Code for Sustainable Development, just like the Rayner family’s prototype).

Of those 208 homes, 104 will be private properties sold through Hill and 104 will be social housing owned and managed by Cambridge City Council – ranging from onebedroom apartments to four-bedroom homes. Most of the other houses in the new Clay Farm development are being built to Level 4 of the Code for Sustainable Development. This level of eco-friendly features is standard in many other parts of Europe, but is still unusual among housing developments in the UK, which some industry observers say are lagging at least 20 years behind other parts of Europe like Germany and Scandinavia.

So what was the drawback for the Rayner family – whose prize value is estimated to be worth more than £50,000?

“I kept saying to them – what is the catch? There’s got to be a catch,” says Dave. “We got chatting to Hill. They

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just said, ‘we need someone to live in the house. Just live in it. We want you to press buttons. If things break, they break. We want to know what works’.”

Eco living without much effort After their initial trepidation about ruining the décor with children’s toys, the Rayners settled happily into their new home. Two weeks after they moved to Trumpington, they welcomed new baby Orla Rose into their family. And so far, it seems, there don’t seem to be too many downsides to eco-friendly living.

“It’s all really done for us,” says Lorna, who particularly loves her purpose-built laundry drying room with a dehumidifier that dries clothes dries clothes in double quick time.

“ Also I love being inside and just having those big windows, you feel like you’re outside.”

“There’s a little dial by the door (that looks like a baby monitor),” she says.

“In the fuse cupboard by the door, there are monitors to keep track of our water consumption, heating and everything.”

“In terms of what we have to do differently, there isn’t really anything,” adds Lorna, proudly demonstrating that the toilet water looks completely normal even though it uses harvested rainwater.

“In fact, the idea of the house is so normal people can live in an eco way without too much effort.”

The Rayners complete surveys every month, giving feedback about what’s good and bad about the concept house. They even have a panel next to the light switch in the master bedroom at the top of the house that has buttons to press according to whether the temperature feels cold, hot or ‘lovely’. They have regular interviews with an academic called Alex from Leeds Beckett University – whose findings are then fed back directly into the design of the new Virido development. And so far there hasn’t been too much to complain about.

“I do like the heating side of things,” says Lorna. “In the bungalow, it was either too hot or too cold.

Here you can saunter around at all times in a T-shirt, even when it’s snowing outside.

“It’s amazing how peaceful it is,” adds Dave, extolling the virtues of the triple-glazed windows. “If you open the window at night, you’ve got lorries and cars flying past on Trumpington Road. But if you shut the windows and curtains, you could be anywhere. You could be in the middle of a field!”

Lorna admits that she was a bit worried at first about uprooting her two oldest children from their home in Burwell. But Harry and Ebony felt at home straight away in their new house.

“As soon as they saw their bedroom, they were up on their bunkbeds and playing on the chalkboard,” says Lorna, pointing to the chalkboard that fills a whole wall of Harry and Ebony’s shared bedroom. The family’s new addition Orla Rose has her very

own giraffe-inspired bedroom next to the master bedroom at the top of the house, with views out across squat bungalows and gardens of Trumpington’s post-war housing estate.

Lorna loves spending time in the open plan kitchen diner that looks out through picture windows onto the garden.

“For me, I can be doing stuff in the kitchen and the kids will be here or in the garden and I can see them,” she says. “Also I love being inside and just having those big windows, you feel like you’re outside.”

The Rayners estimate that Hill spent upwards of £25,000 on decorating the house before the family moved in.

“We have this debate about whether that included the kitchen and bathrooms, and we don’t think it did,” says Lorna, incredulously.

“The lampshades in the lounge – my friend said they’re £250 from John Lewis. I can’t imagine spending that much on anything.

Specially a lampshade.” “That’s half a holiday,” agrees Dave.

Living the dream And while the Rayners might well have treated themselves to a few extravagances during a year of rent-free living, instead they are putting all the money that they would normally spend on rent and bills straight into a savings account so they have enough to put a deposit down on a house by the end of the year.

“We could go out and be flashy but we want to keep on saving,” says Dave. “We’re a bit boring like that.

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You can see we’ve got a 1997 caravan in the driveway and a ten-year-old car! We got the caravan a couple of years ago just for fun. Harry thinks it’s the most exciting thing.”

In fact, on a daily basis, the Rayners’ finances haven’t changed that much.

Although in terms of savings, it has brought their dream of buying their own family home so much closer.

“Financially it’s probably brought us on ten years,” says Lorna. “It’s incredible. So many people would benefit from this kind of break.

We’ve got a lot of friends who are in similar situations. They want to buy a house and they were like, ‘wow, I’d live in a cardboard box for free!’”

“You hear of people winning the lottery or winning whatever,” says Dave. “We’re obviously that couple who have actually won something. I always chat to everyone about everything and they’re really amazed!”

“I keep telling Harry we’re on holiday for a year,” says Dave. “It’s a lovely place to live, a lovely setting. We love walking over to the park. Although it’s surrounded by houses, there’s a lot of space for the kids to run around in. And they love going to visit the chickens [by the allotments].

It’s a real novelty.”

“One of the things we were quite excited about was being this close to Cambridge,” adds Lorna. “This is like city living for a year. I like that aspect of it. A couple of time we’ve taken the bus into town. For the kids, it’s a real experience and for us it’s really nice.”

“ I don’t think we would ever look around a house like this and ever imagine that we could afford to buy it.”

“Dave uses the trains to get to work,” she adds. “He cycles down the guided bus route. It’s brilliant. You just go down there and you’re at the station!”

So is there anything the Rayners miss about their old village life in Burwell – which they moved to six years ago from the Essex town of Halstead where they both grew up?

“The thing I miss about Burwell is our friends,” says Lorna. “We wouldn’t have moved if it wasn’t for this [opportunity]. We weren’t looking to leave Burwell. We were quite settled there. But we knew that if we wanted to buy a house we’d have to move eventually. This has given us a really good opportunity, an adventure, and it’s made a step that we knew we’d have to make at some point.”

“We haven’t found the community here yet,” she says. “Because we haven’t been here long enough. That will come, I think in time, specially when Harry starts school.”

Dave also misses the friendliness of village life: “We kind of struck gold with Burwell,” he says. “It’s a really nice village. It’s one of those places that’s not too big. About 10,000 people live there. You can’t help but say hello to pretty much everyone walking down the street.”

“That’s one thing I’ve found strange here,” he adds. “As it’s a city and a larger area here, you don’t necessarily speak to people like that.”

The Rayners would also love to see more facilities in Trumpington, especially as the population continues to grow.

“Trumpington seems to have gone from a small suburb to a whole town in itself,” says Lorna, who’d like to see more local shops. “One thing I do find here is that, if you want anything other than food, you have to go into town. And with kids being the age they are, I tend to avoid it.”

the house really. There’s not really a great deal around. I think it will work itself out, because everything does.”

Dave and Lorna would love to live in Trumpington, if only they could afford it. They have been offered first refusal to buy the concept home after their contract runs out in January 2016. But it’s been valued at around £550,000, which is way beyond their price range.

“It’s great that they’re building eco houses that people can actually live in (if you can afford them!” says Lorna. “Normally you only see eco houses on Grand Designs!

And people build them and end up in financial ruins for the rest of their lives.”

“We haven’t really entertained the idea of staying here, although we’d love to because of the house and the location,” says Lorna. “It’s just not realistic. We want to buy our own house. We’ve looked at shared ownership [in Trumpington], but even with that you feel you’re spending a lot of money that isn’t going on your house because you’ve still got rent to pay.”

The opposite scenario has been true for Dave and Lorna, who have used the year as an opportunity to climb onto the housing ladder. In fact, we have just heard the news that they have had an offer accepted on a house in Newmarket! But they plan to come back to Trumpington to see what the house looks like in future.

“It’s not just Trumpington, it’s the whole of Cambridge that’s gone crazy,” she says. “When you see a house for less than half a million, you think it’s cheap. It’s a sign of the times. We don’t earn masses of money. We’re quite average really.

We’re looking at Newmarket and Ely as much more affordable. I don’t think we would ever look around a house like this and ever imagine that we could afford to buy it.”

“We’re starting to look at houses,” says Lorna. “We’re thinking it would be nice to have one ready when we move out of here. We can get the mortgage we want. It’s just finding

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And what do the Rayners think about Hills’ plans to build 208 zero carbon homes, using their own year of Trumpington living as a prototype?

“I’m intrigued to come back in ten year’s time,” says Dave. “I think it will be completely different. Most of this [Foster Road] estate will probably still be here, but I can see the area between here and the M11 will all be houses. I can see this becoming its own little town really, with everything it needs.”

“ I can see this becoming its own little town really, with everything it needs.” habitorials Issue 1 – Lorna & Dave Rayner { Page 31 }

Credit Stephen Brown

Name Name Stephen & Shirley Brown Age Age Retired LivesLive in Bishops Road Moved to trumpington in in 1974 Moved to Trumpington TypeType of housing of housing 2-bedroom detached house, built in 2013 Current value Houses on Bishops Road have a current average value of £432,257, according to Zoopla Favourite place in trumpington Favourite place in Trumpington Shirley’s favourite place is her own garden, while Stephen’s is away from the city in the countryside.

Credit Stephen Brown

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Credit Stephen Brown

Credit: Plant Breeding Institute

Stephen & Shirley Brown

n o t g n i p m u r T Through Time

In 1974, when Stephen and Shirley Brown arrived in Trumpington, cows used to graze on the fields behind their house on Bishops Road. Over the years, it was a favourite family pastime to collect fresh eggs and milk from the local dairy farmer, Mr Martin, and hay for the children’s guinea pigs. In the row of shops along Anstey Way, there was a family-run butcher and a good independent greengrocer alongside today’s Bun Shop, as well as a well-stocked hardware store, packed with everything you can imagine.

“I found it a very friendly village when we came,” reminisces Shirley, as she bustles around her new open plan kitchen rustling up tea in an old-fashioned teapot complete with tea cosy and homemade cake on china plates.

The Browns met in Uganda, where Stephen worked for ten years at a cotton research station and Shirley worked as a teacher before they were married. But they had to flee the country after Idi Amin’s brutal dictatorship swept to power. Shirley was eight months pregnant with their second child when the couple was forced to pack up a few treasured possessions and leave their life in Africa behind them.

Stephen got a job at the Plant Breeding Institute (PBI) in Trumpington. In its heyday the agricultural research institute had up to 400 staff testing and carrying out research on wheat, maize, potatoes and other crops on the 400 acres of land that has recently become home to the new Trumpington Meadows development and the

Trumpington Park and Ride site. Stephen worked there until he retired 16 years ago.

The first house the Browns bought on Bishops Road (number 37) cost just £12,000 back then. Today that same semi-detached house is worth nearly £600,000, according to the website Zoopla. In 1986 the couple and their three children moved up the housing ladder and further along Bishops Road to a rather grand fourbedroom detached house built in 1952 (the same year as the Queen’s Coronation) with a double garage and a 100 foot garden. It is worth nearly £700,000 in today’s money (again, according to Zoopla).

Out in the country Trumpington wasn’t somewhere Stephen expected to end up. As a Cambridge postgraduate student early in the 1960s, he used to cycle south from the city and into the open fields and villages beyond.

“The first time I cycled out here I thought ‘goodness me, where are we?’” he recalls. “We were completely out in the countryside.”

But he and Shirley quickly settled in Trumpington with their growing family and became pillars of the community.

“When we arrived it was still effectively a village,” says Stephen. “If I give you an example, there was a horticultural society that had been going for decades.

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They had an annual show, an enormous one, with outside classes from other places and special trophies for it. They had flower shows, vegetable shows, children’s classes, art classes… There were over 150 members then. That gradually ran down and the external classes were dropped. It was moved to a smaller hall and numbers dropped off until gradually nobody was really interested in gardening any more. They just wanted to be entertained. So we put it on ice...”

Back in the 1970s, there were lots of local clubs for Shirley and Stephen to throw themselves into – from the Horticultural Society to the Tuesday Group (an alternative to the Women’s Institute) to the Trumpington Elderly Action Group and the Fish Scheme, which organises lifts for elderly residents.

But gradually many of these clubs that used to bring local people together have begun to falter as the demographics of Trumpington have changed.

Stephen puts this dwindling interest down to a gradual change of attitude that he’s seen as people’s lifestyles have changed over the decades.

“We had a very active Trumpington Elderly Action Group,” says Shirley. “That’s packing up now. One more meeting and that’ll finish. We cannot get new members and we cannot get people to be on the committee to run it. Nobody’s prepared to do it.”

“ I found it a very friendly village when we came.”

“I illustrated this at the time by taking a satellite picture of Bishops Road,” he says. “There were nine gardens where people took an active interest in gardening and that sort of thing on this side of the road. When you look at the gardens now there is nothing except a lawn, shrubs, paddling pool and a swing or a slide. They’re not interested in anything else. People just withdrew from that and had a different lifestyle.”

“If the development had come a few years earlier, it might have saved some of these things,” laments Stephen. “But you see this is associated, I think, with differences of expectations in life. You want your modern televisions, all the other things that go with it, and a lot of women and married people go out to work in order to do that. So when they get home from work, they don’t want to get involved in these other things.”

“As a broad generalisation, the generation after us were more materialistically minded, not so socially minded,” he continues. “They were more acquisitive.

This falls down to the next generation too. It doesn’t apply to everybody, of course. But we think the pendulum is swinging the other way. There’s going

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to be a two generation gap. But the sad thing is they’re not going to have the benefit of learning from their parents or grandparents about things like cookery, do-it-yourself and gardening.”

“ In some ways, it’s a bit sad that it’s grown so big.”

“The other thing is that people rely so much on convenience,” says Stephen. “Everything’s ready in the supermarket whereas our generation had to produce it.”

Shirley agrees: “We were also brought up with rationing and we were very limited in what we could buy,” she says. “We’re of a generation that had to manage.”

Pride and joy For many years, Stephen grew his own vegetables and fruit in the immaculately tended garden behind the family home on Bishops Road.

“When we had a bigger garden, I used to say: ‘I grows it, Shirley cooks it, we both eats it,’” jokes Stephen.

Two years ago, Shirley and Stephen moved into a brand new two-bedroom house that was built on the same plot of land where Stephen used to tend his vegetables for nearly 30 years. He doesn’t grow so

much produce these days, although his greenhouse is still his pride and joy.

“The old garden, I couldn’t manage it in the way I wanted it,” admits Stephen. “We’ve got enough now, thinking about it. It’s been a lot of work turning a building site into a garden.”

Sitting in their new open plan living room that holds a lifetime of memories – from African ornaments to historic photos of Trumpington – Stephen and Shirley are content with their decision to downsize at the end of their old garden.

“We decided on what the layout and design of the house should be to start with and then fitted ourselves in accordingly,” says Stephen, who is 76. “A lot of the fittings we brought with us. There have been a few teething problems but we specified what we wanted and we’ve tried to make it as eco-friendly and sensible as possible.”

Their new pink-clad house has solar panels, excellent insulation and a heat exchange system that keeps the house warm in the winter and cool in the summer – as well as filtering air in the house to keep it fresh. As you walk up the long gravel driveway and into the hallway, the house is a surprising mixture of modern design with traditional fittings. And lots of books! Not to mention a picture gallery of colourful drawings by their four grandchildren.

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From the master bedroom, you look out across the new housing development Novo, which has been built on what was once the arable fields of Glebe Farm. And in the other direction, the driveway sweeps past their old family home and out onto Bishops Road.

Between old and new In some ways, the Brown’s new house is at a crossroads between old Trumpington and the new Trumpington that is growing up around them.

“We knew it was coming and we accepted it,” says Stephen. “But it’s such a shame that the density [of the new housing] is so high. It’s simply because of the price of land. What intrigues me is that there is a lot of infill going on. For example, they’ve built a block of flats where the police house used to be (on Trumpington Road). There’s another example where there was a bungalow near here, they’ve managed to fit three more houses – which is fair enough.”

Stephen and Shirley did consider other locations when they were planning to move house, but they couldn’t find anywhere to rival Trumpington’s location.

“In moments of reflection, I wouldn’t want to be in a city,” admits Stephen. “I was brought up on a farm in Suffolk.

I worked and lived on a station in Africa where we were 17 miles from the nearest town. As you get older, you’ll need the facilities. If we were out in the middle of the countryside now, it wouldn’t be very convenient. Unless you’ve got someone to look after you.”

“I love it here” Shirley’s pull to Trumpington is more of an emotional one. Originally from Yorkshire, she is fiercely proud of where she lives and has produced four lovingly researched books about the area’s history.

“The other tragedy was the fact that the PBI was sold to Unilever in 1987,” he adds. “That worked very, very well and then eventually they pulled out of their agricultural production and sold to Monsanto, who sort of broke the place up and then sold it to development.”

“I love it here,” she says, with a lilt that still betrays her Yorkshire roots. “I really do like Trumpington and I get very cross when people say nasty things about it. If anybody asks me where I live I say ‘Trumpington’ but I know several people around who say ‘Cambridge’. I’m proud to live in Trumpington and I wouldn’t want to live in Cambridge. And it just makes me cross that they seem almost ashamed to be in Trumpington.”

“They don’t realise this, but one variety produced there earned the UK billions of pounds in exports,” says Stephen whose colleagues at PBI were responsible for producing crop varieties such as the Maris Piper potato.

In their latest book, Trumpington Through Time – which is available from the local chemist shop, Gregory’s – Shirley writes how Trumpington was a thriving community long before Cambridge became important,

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“ I’m proud to live in Trumpington.”

Credit: Maurice Rayner

Credit: Stephen Brown

Credit: Stephen Brown

with evidence of Iron Age, Roman and Anglo-Saxon settlements. “Manors of Trumpington are listed in the Domesday Book and Trumpington was noted for its vineyards in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,” she writes. “For hundreds of years, Trumpington was an indepen­dent village with its parish council and established parish church.”

But these days, the boundaries are blurring as the population of Trumpington swells.

Trumpington’s village atmosphere has started to dissipate as the size of the population has increased.

“In some ways, it’s a bit sad that it’s grown so big,” she says. “Before you almost felt you knew everybody in the village.”

“You can’t tell now where Cambridge ends and Trumpington begins,” says Shirley, who is ambivalent about some of the changes taking place. She has only just started shopping at Waitrose because she was so angry when the upscale supermarket was built in Trumpington 15 years ago so close to the local shops on Anstey Way.

“We’re very fortunate that we get on with our new neighbours,” he says. “I just hope that the community can now be got together. I don’t see many signs of it so far, quite frankly. Whether the new community centre will help that, one hopes.”

“Waitrose had only been there a matter of weeks before those shops had to close,” recalls Shirley.

“For a long time, I thought ‘I’ll not use Waitrose.

They’ve ruined our village.’ I went to Sainsbury’s, M&S anywhere. But having gone there, it’s not the fault of the people who work in the shop. And they’re very pleasant.”

“It’s been a gradual change…”

Trumpington is still hanging onto its right to be included in local postal addresses after a heated letter-writing campaign persuaded Royal Mail not to drop the name entirely. But Shirley does regret that

“People did know each other a lot better then,” agrees Stephen, who refers to the new residents moving into Trumpington as being “much more mixed”.

Stephen wants to get away from the artificial barriers that went up between the post-war council estate in Trumpington and residents in other parts of the village.

“Even a few years ago there was still a ‘them and us’ attitude and I just didn’t want that to come with the new developments, if we could possibly avoid it,” says Stephen, who is resigned to the changes the future might bring.

“We have been part of Cambridge for a long while,” he adds. “People don’t think of Trumpington as a village but just another part of Cambridge. It’s been a gradual change. The new developments will hasten that change…”

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Name Catherine Wallace Age 40 Lives Consort Avenue, Trumpington Meadows with her husband Derek, 48, and three children (Charlotte, 13; Alice, 10; James, 5) Moved to Trumpington in October 2013 Type of housing 4-bedroom terraced house, built in 2013, rented from housing association Current rent paid £168 per week Current value 2, 3 & 4 bedroom houses on the Trumpington Meadows development are being advertised from £429,995 to £649,995 on Barratt’s website Favourite place in Trumpington “Some of my fondest memories are of taking the children over to the park near the Pavilion.

The children were relaxed and we’d pop into the Bun Shop [on Anstey Way] and get some treats.”

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Catherine Wallace

THIS IS OUR ” E M O H R E V E R “FO In October 2013, when the Wallace family moved into their four-bedroom dream home on Consort Avenue, the new housing development at Trumpington Meadows was still a building site. The Wallace’s front door opened straight onto a 10-foot high green hoarding that screened off the Portakabins and bacon butties at the site office. The paths had still not been laid and the builders had to fashion temporary ramps so the family of five could get to their front door (their middle daughter, Alice, had broken her ankle and was confined to a wheelchair). Back then, there was nowhere for the kids to play among the 1,200 Barratt homes that were springing up between Waitrose and the Park & Ride site. Today, the Portakabins have been replaced by a play park and the children love nothing better than tumbling out of the front door and onto the monkey bars.

“It’s certainly been a bit of a journey since we moved here,” admits Catherine, who couldn’t wait to move to Cambridge from army quarters in Essex with her husband Derek and their three children.

“My husband was working in the army as a chef and he got made redundant,” she explains. “We had been living in army accommodation for 15 years since we were married, and the house was tied with the job.”

Catherine met Derek 17 years ago when he was first stationed in Cambridge and she was still living with her parents in Longstanton and working at Tesco’s as a stock control assistant. Since then, the

Wallaces have done two tours of Northern Ireland, two and a half years in Cyprus and seven months in Germany before coming back to postings in Waterbeach then Wimbish in Essex. Charlotte, 13, was born in Belfast. Alice, 10, was born in Limassol, Cyprus. While James, 5, was born down the road at Addenbrooke’s Hospital.

“ Because I know Cambridge well, it’s made it a lot easier to settle into what in theory is our forever home.”

“I’ve pretty much done a full circle really because I was born in Cambridge, I met my husband in Cambridge, then travelled the world and finally decided to settle back in Cambridge,” says Catherine, 40, who always wanted to come back to the city where she grew up and where her Mum still lives today.

“Because I know Cambridge well, it’s made it a lot easier to settle into what in theory is our forever home,” she says.

The right move So why did she choose Trumpington?

“The reason why I wanted to come to this specific area was I was fancied the idea of the new build properties,” she says. “I knew about this development and thought it

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sounds like a perfect location for us.

Because the children have all got doctor’s appointments regularly, I wanted to be close to the hospital to make it a bit easier with travel and transport.”

The Wallace children between them have around 25 different professionals caring for their various medical and special educational needs – ranging from dyspraxia to developmental delay to hearing loss and ADHD. Catherine spends a lot of time driving the kids to and from various hospital appointments, which is why living within such easy commuting distance of Addenbrooke’s was such an important consideration.

Catherine also suffers from ill health herself, which means she relies on her mobility scooter and specially adapted car to get about.

Just before James was born in 2010, doctors discovered she had a hole in her heart, which was making her dangerously ill. Today she suffers from chronic asthma, arthritis and a debilitating condition called fibromyalgia, which causes extreme pain and fatigue.

“When I have a flare up it’s almost as though my body’s been dipped in boiling water,” explains Catherine, who some days struggles to get out of bed. Some nights she can’t get up the stairs to her bedroom and sleeps on the black leather sofa surrounded by the hum of the tropical fish tanks that line the length of the living room wall. Derek – who’s studying part-time for an Open University degree in environmental sciences

– is Catherine’s full-time carer.

They rely on disability benefits and income support to make ends meet.

The Wallace’s home – one of 480 affordable homes on the Trumpington Meadows development – has been specially adapted to Catherine’s needs. There’s an extra banister and grab rails, a downstairs wet room with a shower, as well as a bath lift. It helps that the new build properties have been built with wider doors and wheelchairfriendly entrances too, but Catherine is hoping they can install a stair lift soon. Something that wouldn’t have been so easy if they’d moved into an older property.

“We’d seen a couple of older properties because we’re housing association tenants but they were really, really small,” says Catherine.

“I read up a bit on this development and saw that the room sizes were actually quite good. We were very, very surprised at the room sizes.

When we were offered the house here, I had a look at one of the other properties and saw it didn’t have much of a garden. So when we saw this house had a garden, we were really pleased.”

As far as Catherine is concerned, this is definitely the family’s “forever home”. They no longer have to face the uncertainty of moving from pillar to post every few months in different army bases. And they can finally make their Trumpington Meadows house into a home.

“ We plan to stay here for as long as possible.”

Making a statement The first thing the Wallaces set about doing when they moved into their new home was decorating the house in the boldest and brightest colours they could possibly find in the paint shop. The kitchen is a startling sunshine yellow. The staircase is painted in sunset orange. While the end wall of the living room is decorated top to bottom with a beach scene complete with palm trees to remind them of their time in Cyprus.

“It’s seeing the children being settled and actually being in a home,” she says. “Because being in the army it’s never been home. It’s just been a roof over our heads. Being able to decorate and put our things up, and feel we’re not waiting for a letter to come through the door to say ‘you’re going to be moving to another country’…”

“It was also a statement because in an army home everything is magnolia, and if you decorate you’ve got to take it all back to magnolia when you move out,” says Catherine.

“We decorated one house and the paint wasn’t even dry before we were told we had to move in ten days. So when we moved to this house, we wanted to make a big statement with feature walls.”

“To know we can be here for as long as we choose to be here, and we can do as much or as little as we want to do with the home,” she adds.

“Getting involved with the area; getting to know people. We’re not being forced to do anything. It’s all of our decisions,” she says.

All the children’s bedrooms have different themes – for 5-year-old James, it’s a space man odyssey; 10-year-old Alice’s room is an underwater adventure; while 12-year-old Charlotte’s room will have a graffiti wall, as soon as she’s learned how to keep her bedroom

habitorials Issue 1 – Catherine Wallace { Page 40 }

tidy, according to her Mum! For the master bedroom, the feature wall will eventually be decorated with a huge image of the Brooklyn Bridge.

It’s not that Catherine’s ever been there – or is ever likely to go there, because she finds it too difficult to get on and off planes these days – but for her, the bridge symbolises the journey they’ve been on to get to where they are today…

“It’s going to be a big community” After two years living in their new home, the children have settled well. The Portakabins have gone elsewhere and outside their front door is a park that’s become a hub of community activity. Dads come and play cricket with the kids in the summer and there have been community events and barbecues there too. For Catherine, it was a big draw to move into a new community where everyone was starting afresh.

“From the military experience, I’d found it quite hard infiltrating a community that’s already in place,” says Catherine. “So to have something that’s brand new and everyone’s in the same boat, with all the children starting at the school is great. It’s going to be a big, massive community...”

Charlotte was one of the first children to start in Year 6 at the new primary school in Trumpington Meadows when it opened in September 2013 (the family had to commute backwards and forwards for a month from Essex to the school because their new house wasn’t quite ready). And all three children have thrown themselves into local activities – with karate on Mondays, youth club on Tuesdays, swimming on Wednesdays and drama club on Thursdays. Charlotte has also joined Trumpington’s youth panel, and has been away on residential weekends with the local youth club too.

“ I knew about this development and thought it sounds like a perfect location for us.”

“The children were born into the army way of life but Charlotte did find it very difficult,” admits Catherine. “To her, leaving her friends was the end of the world.

Since we moved here, she’s made some good friends from the

habitorials Issue 1 – Catherine Wallace { Page 41 }

development and the village too from the activities she does.”

Catherine has found it more difficult to make friends, though, because it’s so challenging for her to get out and about. She has one friend who she meets for coffee occasionally at nearby Waitrose, where she stocks up on dairy-free foods for herself and Alice (though she prefers Tesco’s for the family’s weekly shop).

She struggled to make friends with her immediate neighbours at first because they didn’t speak much English (one set of neighbours is from Hungary and the other is from Turkey). But things have definitely got easier as time has gone on.

“I’ve noticed with the school there are lots of people from different cultures that we say hello to,” says Catherine. “It’s nice and it’s interesting. Now we’ve been here a few years, we’re getting to know people.”

The only complaint Catherine really has about her new “forever home” is the occasional late night noise from fireworks let off for celebrations at neighbouring Anstey Hall, which has recently been turned into a B&B and wedding reception venue.

And parking, which is an ongoing issue for the Wallace family.

Everyone in the new development has been allocated up to two parking spaces – and the Wallaces were allocated a double garage directly behind their home, which sounds like the perfect solution. However, the family have two specially adapted vehicles so that Catherine can get her mobility scooter in and out of the cars when she needs to – using ramps and hoists. And the double garage is just not big enough for both of these cars.

“ Maybe what I like is developments designed around people walking, like in old times.

These areas have been designed to use more cars.”

“One of our vehicles doesn’t physically fit in the garage because it’s wheelchair adapted,” Catherine explains. “My car we put in the garage but I can’t open my doors properly.”

Ironically there are two parking spaces marked as disabled directly behind the Wallace’s garage, but these are allocated to other houses where there are no blue badge holders. The situation is frustrating and is unlikely to be resolved until the roads are adopted by the Highways Agency, according to Catherine. In the meantime, she has already had one parking ticket for parking in front of her own house.

“I disputed that and the parking enforcement team said I should park in the disabled spaces,” says Catherine. “It’s a bit of a vicious cycle and it’s confusing to know who’s responsible. Obviously when they planned the development, they needed to have a certain number of disabled parking spaces, but I don’t believe these should have been allocated to homes. To me it seems the disabled parking spaces aren’t worth the paint – and I’m aware of another family that are having the same problem.”

Parking issues aside, though, the Wallaces couldn’t be happier with their decision to move to Trumpington.

habitorials Issue 1 – Catherine Wallace { Page 42 }

“Parking has been the only headache that we’ve had since we’ve been here,” says Catherine. “It’s something we’ve just adapted to and managed how we can. Yes, it’s inconvenient but the benefits and everything else of being here outweighs that and it will be sorted at some point.”

“ To have something that’s brand new and everyone’s in the same boat, with all the children starting at the school is great.”

“We plan to stay here as long as possible,” she adds. “Charlotte joked that this is her home now until she gets married!”

Looking at the sheer excitement in Charlotte’s eyes as she gives a tour of her precious bedroom, carefully navigating the piles of clothes and toys, it’s clear that she too has fallen in love with her family’s “forever home”. And it looks like she has no plans to leave any time soon either…

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Name Steve & Sam Harris Age 78 & 35 Live Shelford Road Moved to Trumpington Steve and his wife Dee moved to Trumpington in 1972; they share their house with their youngest son Sam, his wife Fran and their two young daughters, Katie and Amy Type of housing 3-bedroom terraced house, built in 1902 Current value Similar houses on Shelford Road have a current value of around £455,000, according to Zoopla Favourite places in Trumpington Steve loves going along to the car boot sale at the Trumpington Park and Ride on Sunday mornings to pick up a bargain. Sam’s favourite spot is the newly named local pub, the Hudson’s Ale House

“ It’s unbelievable, the change.”

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Steve & Sam Harris

n o t g n i p m u Tr Treasures

Walking into the Harris household is like stepping into a treasure trove. Their late Victorian terrace at the top of Shelford Road is stuffed to the beams with antiques – from a Medieval cupboard that once stored monks’ habits (and is now used to store board games) to a colourful collection of Wedgewood tiles to a 1930s wind-up gramophone to two imposing Victorian family portraits to pink ceramic pigs purloined from a local butcher’s shop. Between all these breathtaking treasures perch the day-to-day reminders of family life – a hand-knitted Christmas pudding hat slung over a brass lamp; a school solar system project nestled by the brick fireplace; a motorcycle helmet balancing precariously on a beautifully carved wooden chest. Venture up the stairs and you’ll find a collection of model buses and Airfix models like you’ve never seen before – even in a toy museum. Each one of them holds a story that 78-year-old Steve will happily regale you with, if you have a few hours to spare.

And that’s just the beginning. Step out of the back door and you are transported to another world still. There’s a model railway track around the edge of the garden – complete with tiny stations, houses and passengers – which Steve has lovingly created with his son Sam over the past four decades for their own home-made model steam engines. There’s Steve’s workshop where he whiles away many hours working on his intricate models (and in fact, where he made the old Trumpington village sign).

And right at the very end of the garden, there’s a garage where Sam spends much of his spare time tinkering with an impressive collection of classic cars and motorbikes.

Steve and his wife Dee – a repertory actress, who trained in London alongside the likes of Julie Christie, Pauline Collins and close friend Jennie Linden – moved to Shelford Road from Hertford in 1972 with their two oldest sons.

At the time, Steve worked in an antique shop in Hertford and decided to open up a shop in Royston, with the backing of a wealthy benefactor, who bought the threebedroom terrace on Shelford Road for the family to live in for the princely sum of £14,000.

The characterful row of typical Victorian terraces (finished in 1902, the year after Queen Victoria died) was built for the railway workers, according to Steve. The guard who

originally lived in the Harris house used to run across the fields to the station back in the days when the steam railway ran along the tracks where today’s guided busway shuttles backwards and forwards between Trumpington and the station and beyond. But in spite of Steve’s fascination for steam railways, it wasn’t this particular connection that drew him to the house in Trumpington – it was simply the location.

“It was convenient for Royston,” he says. “And we were also going to open another gallery in Cambridge. So it was a nice halfway. I could get up in the morning and roll out of bed to Royston or roll out of bed to Cambridge in the other direction.”

Steve eventually ended up buying the house from his boss, as well as buying the lease on the shop in Magdalene Street in the centre of Cambridge where he ran an antique store for many years before he had his first hip operation in the 1980s. Sam and Dee joke that many of the antiques seemed to have found their way into their own living room rather than being sold. Dee also remembers – when Sam came along in 1980 – wheeling him into the shop in an old 1950s pram, only to find when she came back that one of Steve’s customers wanted to buy the pram, not realising there was a baby asleep in it!

Today, Steve and Dee share their home with Sam, now 35, and his wife Fran and their two daughters, 13-year-old Katie and 7-year-old Amy. Sam has lived in this house all his life with views from his baywindowed-bedroom across to the cemetery on the other side of the road (this is now the bedroom his daughters share). And he remembers playing as a boy in the woods where Waitrose now stands in the shadow of the late 17th century mansion, Anstey Hall.

“It was lovely and peaceful,” recalls Sam. “I had lots of friends round here and we used to play out the back all day long because there were never really any cars out there. We used to go over the road and play in the woods where Waitrose is now. That was a nice little wooded area. There were lots of places to play. It was very pleasant indeed.”

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“ We used to go over the road and e is now.” play in the woods where Waitros

End of play The changes started to happen in Trumpington, says Sam, when the woodland was cleared to make way for Waitrose at the beginning of the new millennium.

“That was end of play,” he says.

“It’s almost hard to imagine what it was like now,” he adds. “When you used to walk down to where the Park and Ride is now, that was a field with tennis courts and all sorts. If I’d moved away from Trumpington and come back, I wouldn’t even recognise it. It’s only because I’ve seen it happen that it doesn’t seem so painful.

It’s unbelievable, the change.”

Although Sam isn’t the biggest fan of change, he doesn’t see the new additions to Trumpington life necessarily as a bad thing. Although everyone complained about Waitrose at the time, he says, it’s very useful to be able to pop over the road when you’ve run out of milk.

“It’s handy, I have to say,” he adds. “I don’t do weekly shops there but my Mum goes there every day, and if you need a pint of milk or something it’s very convenient.

They say Waitrose is expensive but you can usually get some good deals. So that’s the thing – it has been very convenient it being there, in hindsight. I know everyone was against it at the time, but there’s no point not using it when it’s there!”

The things that Sam misses most about the Trumpington of his youth include the Hobby Store model shop on Trumpington High Street – where he worked as a manager in his twenties and where he and his dad used to be regular customers until it closed its doors 18 months ago. (Last year, the shop – which Sam also remembers as a

Co-op supermarket in his childhood – reopened as Cooke Curtis & Co. estate agents.) Sam also misses the Tally Ho pub, where he worked for many years as well.

“In my twenties, I used to work at the Unicorn (now the Lord Byron pub),” says Sam. “Then I was manager of Hobby Store. When the Tally Ho opened, I always fancied having a go at bar work. So I ventured the question and I got a job there. So I did evenings at the pub and days at the model shop just over the road. That was really handy!”

“Bar work doesn’t set the world on fire from a monetary point of view,” he admits. “But it’s just such a friendly sociable thing to do. And I’m very friendly and sociable.

Some of my best deals have been done over the bar – buying or selling the odd classic car. The good thing about a pub is that anything you need, someone who comes in the pub has the skills to do it. So if you need a window cleaner or a plasterer, they’re usually having a pint at the bar. You can usually chat them up and do a deal. So even though you don’t get many wages, it’s extremely beneficial. Or you could just sit there all afternoon talking about classic cars, which I could quite happily do without batting an eyelid.”

Sam – who studied engineering at college and also works for Cambridge Motorcycles in Cambridge as his day job – worked on and off at the Tally Ho until it changed hands and reopened recently as Hudson’s Ale House (which was the pub’s original name).

“Again, not being a massive fan of change, when the Tally shut and we heard about the new venture, everyone was a bit perturbed by it because obviously it was another lovely old drinking hole that’s turned into some sort of gastro modern thing,” says Sam. “But I do go into Hudson’s and it’s very pleasant. The Tally Ho did need some work. It

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on gt n pi m u Tr om fr ay aw ed ov m d I’ “ If it.” e is gn co re en ev ’t n ld ou w I , ck ba e and com

was falling apart. The trouble is that all the managers over the last few years were just fill ins. So no one put any money up because it wasn’t really their concern to do so, they were just basically renting it. But the new guy has obviously bought in so it’s in his best interest to do something to it. And what they have done to it is nice.

If the Tally Ho was still next door, it would be like the perfect pair of pubs. But unfortunately it’s replaced the Tally Ho, which is a shame really.”

Despite his reservations, the newly reopened pub is still Sam’s favourite watering hole in Trumpington.

“I put my head round there a fair bit and you still see the same faces,” he says. “The beer’s a bit more expensive but they have eight real ales now whereas the Tally Ho only had three and they never used to sell that many. But he seems to be able to shift real ale on a regular basis.

The whole idea behind the pub is it’s local so all the real ales are from the local area, which is good. Nothing’s from further away than Norfolk.”

The former coaching inn – which has been serving beer since 1846 – braced itself for an influx of new drinkers when the new houses were first built, says Sam, but they mainly got contractors popping in after a hard day’s labour.

“I think you could count on one hand the amount of new people who actually came through the door from those thousands of new houses [to the Tally ho],” he says.

“I think it’s because most of the people living in them are young people that are working and they’re up early in the morning and off to London, or off here and there.

It’s just basically somewhere to sleep and live. And they don’t seem to wander down to the pub.”

Different times So what does Sam think of Trumpington as a place to bring up his daughters, who have both been to the same local Fawcett Primary School around the corner that he and his older brothers attended?

“In a way it’s nicer than it was, funnily enough,” he adds.

“You’ve lost the walk through the woods and we used to love walking to the old railway line. But there are some parks being built and areas for children and obviously we’re very near the new [secondary] school. For them actually it’s probably beneficial. Because they don’t know what it was like, they don’t miss it. I enjoyed it but it was a different situation back in my day.”

“Even though I’ve seen major changes in Trumpington, it’s still not actually that major,” says Sam. “Apart from the fact that you pass a lot of houses on the way in and way out, I’ve already forgotten what it did look like.”

Trumpington residents always knew that houses were going to be built, agrees Steve, but the scale took them all by surprise.

“We didn’t think it was going to happen on the scale it has,” says Steve. “The scale is astronomical. We thought a few hundred houses might come but not thousands and thousands.”

But on a day to day basis the new developments are not affecting the Harris household too much, although Sam relies more and more on one of his 15 motorbikes these days to avoid the slow-crawling traffic along Trumpington High Street.

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“ Trumpington has always been ...”

Trumpington, since Roman times

“My idyllic place would be somewhere in the country with all my collection in a great big barn with a big workshop where I could go out and tinker and play,” says Sam. “But maybe that’s an idyllic dream. Maybe the fact that this place is so handy, so near Cambridge, so near all the facilities like the hospital etc, maybe that’s more of a benefit than having large amounts of space. If I had a big barn attached to a large manor house, it would be full of classic cars. But the more space you have, the more you fill.”

“For being in Cambridge we’re very lucky the amount of space we actually do have,” he adds. “If you live in the centre of town, you have to park your one car on the street with your wing mirrors knocked off every week.

So we are lucky to have so much parking and so much space really. But more would be nice.”

Steve agrees: “If you compare this house with the new ones that are going up, they haven’t got the space.

They’re getting smaller and smaller and more and more cramped. We’ve watched them building them and they went up overnight. When we built a house years ago, you’d build it and let it settle. Today they’ve done it in a night. You’re thinking, ‘hang on that didn’t have a roof on it yesterday’. It’s a space thing. Space is money.”

Like his Dad, Sam wouldn’t be keen on living in one of the new houses they can just see from their front bedroom.

“Looking at those new houses, I could never live in a place like that,” he says. “It’s all so clinical and boring and everything looks the same. Every single house looks identical. There is no character, no nothing. And there isn’t room to swing a cat. So when you look at that, you’re quite grateful for what you’ve got.”

“If we sold this house, we could probably buy one outright,” adds Sam. “But we wouldn’t really ever want to. I mean yes, I could go down the road of getting a mortgage, I assume. I’d have to change my lifestyle and sell quite a lot of my collection, but it is possible. But I never would in a million years. I’d rather live in a tent on the green.”

In spite of their reservations about the new developments and the changes going on all around them, Steve and Sam are mostly relieved that Trumpington seems to be retaining its own identity even as it grows.

“Thank God they kept the name Trumpington,” says Sam. “There was talk of Trumpington not existing. But Trumpington is Trumpington.”

“Trumpington has always been Trumpington,” agrees Steve. “Since Roman times.”

“I’d rather live in a tent on the green.”

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Is this Trumpington’s Time?

A Writer’s Afterthought by Vicky Anning

When I first moved to Trumpington more than a decade ago, some of my friends were mightily amused by the name of the village on the outskirts of Cambridge where I had chosen to ‘settle down’ after years of roaming the globe.

Those who were old enough remembered the animated children’s series ‘Trumpton’, which started each episode with the sleepy announcement: “Here is the clock, the Trumpton clock. Telling the time steadily, sensibly, never too quickly, never too slowly.

Telling the time for Trumpton.”

The clock tower would chime nine o’clock – the sign for the townsfolk of Trumpton to go about their daily business: Mr Clamp showing off his fine display of vegetables, and Mrs Cobbit arriving with her freshly cut flowers. Then the day’s events would unfold sleepily with the arrival perhaps of the carpenter Chippy Minton in his truck, or Policeman Potter.

Trumpton had a grand town hall with just two employees (a mayor and a town clerk), lots of small independent shops and a fine market square in the middle of which stood a statue of Queen Victoria.

The town also boasted a picturesque park with an old-fashioned bandstand. It was in this bandstand that the Trumpton fire brigade (remember: Pugh, Pugh, Barney, McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble & Grub?) would play us out at the end of each episode, while the good folk of Trumpton looked on.

If I was looking for this sleepy vision of small town life, I certainly didn’t find it in Trumpington when I moved here in 2005. By the time I arrived, most of the small village shops on Anstey Way had long closed down after Waitrose moved in. The cows that used to cross Trumpington High Street twice a day to be milked were also long gone. The only outward signs of village life were a few stray thatched cottages dotted along the busy high street among the petrol stations (there used to be two) and the few remaining local shops. The new community square planned for Trumpington was just a twinkle in the town planners’ eyes.

Until my daughter started going to the local nursery at Fawcett Primary School, I found it hard to break into the social fabric of Trumpington. We lived right at the end of Bishops Road – the very southern tip of Cambridge – overlooking fields and not much else. Behind our garden fence was an overgrown pathway that nobody ever used. We were buffeted by the same wind flurries that today blast the new houses of the Novo development on Glebe Farm. I can distinctly remember, at one of my daughter’s earliest birthday parties, her cake being showered by dust and hay blown in by wind eddies as a combine harvester lumbered noisily around the fields behind our back fence.

Perhaps it was because I had other things going on in my life that I didn’t have much time to integrate into the local community. One year after moving to Trumpington, my husband died of cancer. I was left to raise our one-year-old daughter Jenna alone and was so busy making ends meet and trying to be a good Mum that I didn’t really have much time to stop and chat with my neighbours, let alone get involved with community life.

I did consider moving away to be closer to my family up North (it was my husband’s job that originally brought us to Cambridge). But there were many things that persuaded me to stay in Trumpington – including the fantastically convenient location that so many of our interviewees have mentioned. I could be on the M11 in minutes; I could jump on the Park & Ride bus into Cambridge; I could catch the train to London in no time at all; and I could cycle out into the fields of Grantchester and imagine, as I picknicked by the banks of the River Cam, that I actually lived in the countryside.

I figured Cambridge was a good place to bring up my daughter. Like many people, we started out looking for houses in the centre of Cambridge, but soon realised we could get far more for our money if we lived on the edge of the city. Trumpington offered a convenient (and at that time relatively affordable!) place for us to put down some roots. It proved to be a good choice.

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A Farewell from the Residents in Residence

E M O H W O H S M O FR e m o H c i l b u P to Britt and Elyssa are Residents in Residence for Habitorials: A Showground for Real Living. Both artists, they moved into a show home on Countryside Properties’ Abode development in January 2015. They have lived there part time for the past year, experiencing what it would be like to be residents in an expanding contemporary urban development in Trumpington.

They got to know the area and the people who live in it by hosting a series of neighbourhood gatherings, big and small, that responded to some of the issues and changes that they saw around them. Habitorials: A Showground for Real Living is a 3-year public art project that offers residents the opportunity to reflect, imagine and build the future of their community.

The very first time we opened the door and stepped into our new fully furnished house, it felt like we were walking into a John Lewis catalogue. For the first few months, we kept on setting the table back to its original Show Home staging – set for six people to have a three-course dinner.

We spent a year living as ‘residents in residence’ in this three-bedroom Show Home with a view out onto the Countryside’s Marketing suite and the Addenbrooke’s Road roundabout. We discovered that living in a Show Home was sometimes confusing – were we in a private or public space? There was a sign next to our front door that announced the ‘show’ aspect of our temporary new home to all passers-by. Often people would knock on the door or if we hadn’t locked it, they sometimes just wandered in to have a look around. Some people were horrified by the idea that they could have been intruding, others intrigued and some didn’t seem to think it at all unusual that the house came with ‘show’ residents. So we showed visitors around, often deftly sweeping up a dirty towel or a used cup along the way.

Developing on this idea of a Show Home and a public resident, we started to invite people around for visits to talk about what might happen here. Together with other residents we

began to extend the Show Home’s domestic space into a public one, staging a question or an issue that had arisen around public life or community life. For example, we transformed the ground floor of the Show Home into a Showground Library and Real Living Café in order to host formal and informal discussions about the new community and health centre being built in Hobson’s Square. Many of our neighbours wondered how it would take shape – physically and organisationally – so we thought we should just get on with modelling an imagined Community Centre in the Show Home. The Show Home started to slowly transform into a ‘showground of real living’; a show and tell home of public life and a test site for community encounters.

One of the questions we had asked ourselves when working on events was: which voices are not often publicly heard around here?

This led us to invite a group of young people from different parts of the area to spend time together sharing ideas about ‘real living’. They developed ideas for a series of short films in response to their experience of living in Trumpington, which they then wrote, directed, shot and acted in. As part of the process of making Trumpington Show Reals, we asked them what kind of vegetable Trumpington might be. ‘A big fat potato’, was one of the answers, because:

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‘It’s good for everyday cooking. It is a bit ugly but very versatile and has a lot of potential!’ There was an immediacy about the way this group regarded their local community. They didn’t choose to live here, so they didn’t have to ask themselves if they’d made a good choice, or if it was really the place that was advertised to them.

They also didn’t necessarily see Trumpington as part of a future they had to invest in. While for some this might make them seem like less than ideal community builders, it became clear to us that they are brilliant critical friends and a fantastic resource for any community.

By the summer we started to feel like the show home had truly transformed into a house where the public could gather. There were two particular moments that marked this change for us. The first was when the chickens arrived to live in the Show Garden, behind the Show Home. Lisanne, better known to some as Lorelei Lodestar (her artist and gardener persona), had been caring for the chickens. Throughout the year Lorelei has been active in the garden, sharing her skills with new residents, offering a plant swop box outside our front door and bringing plants from the older parts of Trumpington to plan in the newer part. When she went on summer holiday she passed the caring responsibilities for the chickens and garden on to kids from the neighbouring streets

of the new development. With the garden gate on the latch different people stopped by to feed or just look at the chickens.

The second moment was when we hosted our first Show Home pub. Unlike the other events, which had been actively initiated by looking for a ‘topic’, nobody quite remembers who came up with the idea of the pub. Maybe somebody said, ‘It’s a pity that we don’t have a proper local, a space where we can just turn up and meet neighbours.’ So that led us to set up a monthly pub night – on the third Thursday of every month. Sometimes when people come to the pub they ask if they should take their shoes off.

In fact, Jussi often turns up in his house shoes.

The lines between the public and the domestic have become truly blurred, which is a good thing, in our eyes.

This strange blurring between public and domestic might also make it possible to be more inclusive when community members come together. Public meetings can be quite scary for some. Sometimes it can be easier to say something important while standing in a doorway (ideally wearing a pair of slippers!).

Of course, it is fair to say that sometimes we encouraged people to perform in public under the guise of a ‘harmless’ community event. It is a Show Home after all and that weird sense of

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being in a constructed film or theatre set has always been very present for us. Others have commented on the relationship between the Show Home and the fake town populated by actors central to the conceit of the Truman Show.

That’s why it was so much fun to rearrange the space into many different sets; a museum, a conference summit table, a cinema, a library, a café, a training centre, a community kitchen, a garden show, and, of course, a pub.

The Show Home has been and constantly is in the process of becoming a community residence. Over time, others have played the resident in residence role and hosting duties have moved between different people. People have written to us with ideas for things they could run from the space – from a neighbourly exchange of skills and services to a meeting, or maybe a café or a small restaurant. The fluid, performative aspect of the space allows people to try out things.

Last May at the Showground Library and Real Living Café event, we hosted Alison Wheeler from the co-operative library system in Suffolk.

She ended her case study presentation with the following words: ‘Community ownership is about more than giving people a voice.

It is about giving people a role.’ We agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment and

would add that sometimes it is even better if community ownership is about people taking on a role themselves. In order for that to be possible, it is important that the same people don’t play the same role for too long.

And so, in order to continue to create space for new hosts and new performances of community, we want to step aside and take our leave from the Show Home. We believe there is a real need for this hybrid domestic public space to develop further as a place to support continued experimentation with models for communal life – at least till the community centre is open. We’d like to see it continue as a Public Home where people could gather and perform, trial, build, plan, negotiate and celebrate this elusive thing called community. But we’ve been told that the Show Home will soon need to go back into rotation to help sell houses again.

Much like the decision to build the table on the proposed community garden site that many sat at, shared food on and discussed the future over, we think it can be good to occupy a space in a way that brings an idea you want to try into the world. In this spirit we invite everyone to show case and celebrate the need of a Public Home at the Festival of Ideas on the 11, 12th and 13th of March. See you at 93 Addenbrookes Road!

habitorials Issue 1 – From Show Home to Public Home { Page 64 }

habitorials Issue 1 – From Show Home to Public Home { Page 65 }