Habitorials1

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Showground of REAL LIVING An introduction by Aislinn White

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Field of Dreams Joan Haylock 12

WE’RE COMMUNITY BUILDERS Jens Kirschner

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A Countryside Property Antony Pemberton

EVERYONE’S A NEWBIE HERE

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Georgie Morrill & David Willsher

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I feel grief for the loss of place Ceri Galloway 36

WINDOW ONTO ANOTHER WORLD Monica Leal

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My friends’ nickname for Trumpington is ‘Trampington’ Tom Warburton 48

I GET ON WITH ALL MY NEIGHBOURS Tanya Jolley

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In Search of Common Ground Vicky Anning

Showground G N I V I L L A E of R An introduction by Aislinn White

Trumpington Village had a population of 7,000 when we first arrived. Several new housing developments encircled it, anticipating the arrival of another 10,000 residents. Proud Trumpingtonians who sustained the village’s resident committees and local history groups welcomed us. They talked about their apprehension of the imminent arrivals and the impact they would have on their community – Who would these new people be?

Commuters?! Foreign investors? Would the existing heritage be overlooked, unacknowledged or even succeeded by new residents? And what would they bring to the area?

We also wanted to understand who these new residents would be. We were there to carry out research as part of an on-going art project under a public art strategy by Futurecity for Countryside’s Great Kneighton development: to explore the integration of the new residents with the existing surrounding communities, and their relationship and influence on the future character of this new development.

The site was in mid construction when we arrived and completely devoid of any inhabitants. We were greeted with developers’ glossy hoardings that promised real life, with real people, in a real community. The place was dotted with show homes, arranged to clearly demonstrate how Great Kneighton would be occupied and by whom.

Fittingly, the site was originally home to the Royal Show – the principal UK agricultural show of 1951, 1960 and 1961 – so we started referring to it as “the Showground”.

With the promise of real people in mind we searched the display homes. They were meticulously staged for potential inhabitants to experience the stunning interiors, and carefully placed household objects acted as gentle cues to expose and perform personal preference and similarities. We talked about how interpreting and creating a sense of home can be central to people’s identity, and also how the show homes take advantage of this. Feigning immunity, we were drawn in: Who uses Ecover over Persil?

Organic coffee beans over Fair-trade ground? Or vice versa?

The person who lives here will bake apparently, and there is no microwave...

And there was an offer of detail variation in the ‘choice room’ – yes, there was a room in which to make choices – whereby choosing from a selection of textile samples you may be able to adapt the tone of your home through the upholstery. Even amongst the subtle preferences and variations presented in Great Kneighton, we could clearly perceive the residents who were to occupy the place.

In fact, I can still picture some of them now, flicking through the stylish heavy coffee-table books near their three-piece suite: The Perfect Gentleman. They have breakfast in bed, from a wooden tray with a cafetière of fresh coffee, to be sipped out of a white bone china cup.

A dining room was arranged to show us that there would be four-course meals under a hanging chandelier.

We could glimpse the panache of the lady-of-the house,

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lifestyle, similarities and agreements, was conveyed.

Yet communities fundamentally occur in individuals sharing proximity and land. They come from people living together and are indeterminate by their very nature. How can we, or should we, even imagine harmony between so many (17,500+) disparate and entangled histories and interests? It is apparent that real living also involves real differences, not a constant search for similarities and shared interests.

Near the beginning of our research, in the middle of Trumpington estate, Ceri Galloway unintentionally started telling us of her grief over the poplar trees being felled.

Just a short encounter with her on the street, and just a snippet of personal narrative about the trees she looked out on every day, revealed the real emptiness of the show homes and the real impossibility of selling living through sameness and generalities. Like this, particular accounts, versions and conflicts from residents came to us through other personal narratives, which generated the idea of Habitorials. We met local people who invited us into their homes and told us their stories. This complex network of narratives revealed to us the tangled messiness of real living. All the people who gave their stories also gave many views of what it means to have a place in common.

Thank you for your generosity.

As narratives, Habitorials are inherently conflicts, connec­t­ ing the past to the future from the position of the present, of Trumpington and Great Kneighton. These Habitorials could be considered a presentation of real life, with real people, in a real community, whilst locating a common space beyond Trumpington Vs. Great Kneighton.

The ‘commons’, after all, is an Anglo-Saxon term for arable land jointly owned by all village members, removed from social status. Such a space that we can call ‘common’ is still an essential space, where all individuals have power to make quotidian yet radical contributions. Through their generation, these Habitorials have the potential to help bring together individuals and their differences.

They do not promise consensus or negotiation through shared interests. They offer a space that allows conflict to surface and for us to begin discussions. Here, we offer a showground for differences – a discursive space for genuine questions to be asked. What do you want, for a space of real living in a real community?

Habitorials is part of a research period within the ‘Southern Approach’ public art project, commissioned from the Clay Farm Public Art Strategy. The next stage will be ‘Showground of Real Living’, a year-long programme of events run with and for local residents from a show home in Great Kneighton.

To find out more, go to www.habitorials.org.uk

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Name Jens Kirschner Age 36 Lives in Chaplen Street Moved to Trumpington in March 2013 Type of housing Four-bedroom, three storey, private house, built in 2013 Current value Around £534,000 (according to Zoopla)

“ Trumpington Road is more important than Trumpington, as it has Waitrose on one end and all the private schools on the other…”

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WE’RE

Y T I N U M M O C BUILDERS Jens Kirschner

As you walk into Jens and Wencke Kirschner’s sparkling new three-storey, four-bedroom home in Great Kneighton, it still has the feel and freshly painted smell of a property developer’s immaculately laid out show home. The kitchen surfaces are so shiny you can almost see your reflection in them.

There is no clutter anywhere to be seen.

There are magazines laid out tastefully between two silver candlesticks on a polished glass-topped dining table.

Unblemished calico walls and carpets stretch as far as the eye can see, reflected back at you in floor-to-ceiling windows and gilt-framed mirrors. And there are well-chosen works of modern art placed around the house at careful interludes, including a Matisse-like still life painting by Jens himself.

Both in their early thirties, Jens and Wencke have a kind of pioneering spirit that’s admirable. They were the very first people to move into the state-of-the-art Great Kneighton development in Trumpington back in March 2013. On moving day, their house was still surrounded by diggers and piles of bricks. There was nobody else there apart from the builders and the sales team at the Countryside Properties marketing suite.

Over the next decade, 2,300 new homes – from one-bedroom apartments to five-bedroom detached luxury homes and penthouse flats – are due to spring up in the fields around the Kirschners’ new townhouse. Along with the new houses on the southern fringes of Cambridge will come new schools, a community square with new shops, a library and doctors’ surgery, as well as a 120-acre

country park. Across Great Kneighton, houses are selling for as much as £2 million. And they are being snapped up faster than they can be built.

And yet the Kirschners – who moved to Cambridge from their native Germany in 2007 – didn’t really intend to move to Trumpington at all. In fact, Great Kneighton’s very first residents bought their dream home almost by accident after they came on a shopping trip to Trumpington’s Waitrose at the beginning of 2013. Instead of groceries, they ended up buying a new house.

Jens takes up the story: “Originally, we simply went to Waitrose for shopping and driving past we saw the signs for Trumpington Meadows,” he says, with characteristically Prussian precision. “We were perfectly happy living in the house we were living in and had no intention to actually sell that place. But I said to Wencke I’d really like to have a look at those show homes because they do build some rather fancy things around here. So we went to Trumpington Meadows and it was a no. Basically that was the gist of it, but I did it in slightly more words. I gave the woman in the sales office a rather hard time about those little boxes they sell and told her I could buy something in London for that kind of money...”

“Then we decided to have a look at the other houses in the Great Kneighton development,” he says. “We looked at the show home next to this house and really liked it. It was identical to this house but at a price we knew we couldn’t afford. So we thought, ‘nice place, but forget it’.”

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Undaunted, as soon as the Kirschners got home from their shopping trip to their home on the north side of Cambridge, Jens got on the phone to his bank. And to cut a long story short, they ended up part exchan‑ ging their home in Orchard Park for a newer model on the south side of town when the developers agreed to drop the price. Jens and Wencke became Trumpington residents just a few months later.

It was the proximity to Adden­ brooke’s Hospital that appealed to the husband-and-wife team, with their matching pinstriped shirts, cufflinks and silver-framed Prada glasses. Wencke, who works as a Business and Performance Advisor at Addenbrooke’s, was finding the one-hour commute across town from Orchard Park on the new guided busway tiresome. Now she can walk or cycle to work in less than 20 minutes. In fact, she can more or less see the hospital from their new top bedroom, which Jens has turned into his study.

Jens works as a forensic IT specialist – and has just a short commute from the master bedroom up to the top of the house each day, to a study without a chair and an old-fashioned dial-up telephone.

Lined with carefully labelled files, the study also happens to hold one of the most impressively complex Lego model collections this side of Legoland – including a 12,000 piece shopping street complete with pet shop, an orange 1962 VW campervan and a rescue helicopter with working blades and a winch.

“ It makes sense to know who the people are who live around you rather than sort of just live anonymous lives next to other people living their anonymous life.”

So what was it like moving into a new development when nobody else was living there? Do the Kirschners regard themselves as modern-day pioneers, especially since they were also the first people to move into their brand new home in Orchard Park five years earlier after another one of their Sunday afternoon strolls!

“Being the first to move into a house when someone else built it isn’t pioneering,” replies Jens, without hesitation. But the couple did rapidly become trailblazers of sorts in their community as neighbours started to move in around them.

As the moving vans arrived and the diggers retreated, Jens and Wencke put flyers through their new neighbours’ doors inviting people into their home. They didn’t discriminate between people in the apartment blocks and the five-bedroom luxury homes and those in the 40% of ‘affordable housing’ that is dotted throughout the development.

Everyone was welcome. In the end, more than 40 people turned up to the first open house coffee morning.

It was a kind of extended offering of the neighbourly cup of milk or sugar. And it was the first of many events designed to bring the new community of Great Kneighton residents together. Although they were disappointed that no one from the flats took up their invitation.

“We’re community builders,” says Jens, who organised similar events for Orchard Park residents too.

“We’ve seen what it’s like to live in a house with no community when we moved to Orchard Park.

Basically, when we moved here,

we were the only house occupied.

Then a couple of new people moved in. We weren’t even enough people to call ourselves a village. Realistically speaking we were some little enclave, somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

The nowhere being reinforced by the fact there was construction all around.

As a consequence it was quite easy to get in touch with people, as the few people that were here actually were likely to communicate with each other.

They certainly were after we started it. Of course that’s now sticking because once you know people you don’t ‘unknow’ them. Several of them have been to every single event we’ve done, the bigger things in addition to which we’ve also had a few smaller gatherings where we could sit around the table.

Now I can’t stand outside my house for half an hour without having half a dozen people come by and greet me. It makes sense to know who the people are who live around you rather than sort of just live anonymous lives next to other people living their anonymous life.”

What the couple discovered was that their new neighbours seemed to be a mixture of young professionals like themselves, nearly all of them parents, most of them in their late thirties to early forties. Like the people who moved into the Trumpington local authority housing estate – back in 1947 – all the new residents were thrown together because they were in the same boat. Only they were a slightly different demographic from the residents like Joan Haylock, who originally moved into Trumpington after Second World War. “There’s nobody younger than us,” says Jens. “Let’s put it this way, there are not many people younger than us who can

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actually afford to buy around here.

How are they supposed to do that?”

Some of the new Trumpingtonians have come from other parts of Cambridge, like the Kirschners.

And some have come from other places altogether, attracted perhaps by the marketing of the Great Kneighton housing development as “an investors’ dream” in “one of the most sought-after areas in south Cambridge”.

With names like Abode, Paragon and Aura, the developers are marketing the new homes as an ideal place to live: “Residents of Great Kneighton can combine the benefits of living within one of England’s most historic and vibrant cities with the convenience and enjoyment of modern living,” they write in their marketing blurb.

It’s perhaps not altogether surprising that Trumpington barely gets a mention on Great Kneighton’s slick new website. Trumpington is just not that big a draw for most of the new residents moving in here, according to Jens.

“I can’t speak for the entire development,” he says, with characteristically forensic attention to detail.

“But certainly for the bits that I know, I’m fairly certain in saying that those who were geographically motivated to move here were motivated by either the proximity to Cambridge, not Trumpington, or much more likely the proximity to Addenbrooke’s. If you challenged them to say whether the fact that this is technically Trumpington mattered to them or not I doubt you’d find anyone who’d say yes.”

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m e th h it w y p p a h y tl c fe r e p “ I’m

e ’r y e th s a g n lo s a , re e th g in liv per fectly indif ferent to me living here…”

“Trumpington Road is more important than Trumpington, as it has Waitrose on one end and all the private schools on the other,” he continues. “There is a very high proportion of private school atten­­dants in this development.

A lot of money is being spent on school fees. That too sort of demonstrates how different that demographic is here.”

Similarly, the Kirschners fear they will have little in common with the existing Trumpington residents – some of whom, like Joan, have lived in the village on the outskirts of Cambridge since there were cows crossing Trumpington High Street four times a day, and acres of arable fields stretched uninterrupted from the village towards the Gog Magog hills.

“You’ve got people who have been living in Trumpington all their life, and all their life is 80 years,” says Jens. “And here you have people of working age. Generally speaking on a development like this, you’ve got people who are presently earning money. So it’s people of working age who haven’t just started out and aren’t about to finish. There aren’t many pensioners. It makes a new development by definition distinctly different to something that has had generations to develop, which is obviously what the rest of Trum­ pington is.”

Jens is not entirely disinterested in his neighbours who live beyond the marketing hoardings of Great Kneighton. He once went along to one of the Community Forums that are being organised for Trumpington residents to find out about the new

development. But he was the only Great Kneighton resident there – and he felt completely out of place.

“The place was packed and it was all old Trumpington residents, not anybody from here,” he says. “It was kind of ironic as the entire event was about this development. They were talking about plans for the community centre.

They were talking about occupation progress. They mentioned they’ve had some residents since March so indirectly they were talking about us. I didn’t say a word at the entire meeting and sat there thinking, ‘what the hell am I doing here?’ I haven’t been back since.”

“When I was at that meeting, a lot of people seemed to be afraid...,” says Jens, momentarily at a loss to find the right words. “In an attempt to summarise it, I can say that they seemed to be worried that we would not give them enough consideration for being the original residents. I’m sorry, I live here and they live there. I’m perfectly happy with them living there, as long as they’re perfectly indifferent to me living here. That’s perfectly fine. Some people seemed worried there would be an ‘us and them’. They seemed worried that we would consciously disregard them as opposed to just not thinking about them. The assumption that we would just not care very much would have been a reasonable one. But the assumption that we would go so far as to actively disregard them in a conscious fashion to me seemed completely over the top. They seemed to feel that we would look down on them when in fact we look in completely different directions… Realistically speaking, people are focused on Addenbrooke’s, focused on the city, but focusing on Trumpington? There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of point to that.”

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For Jens, this ‘us and them’ debate is not entirely new. He sat on the Impington Parish Council when he lived in Orchard Park. But there was a different attitude towards the new development from Impington residents, he says.

“Trumpington is suffering from its edge of the city situation, whereas Impington is a standalone village,” he says. “They too took an interest in the development stuff but there it was always clear that Impington is Impington and the development is the development. At no point did the people in Impington ever appear like they expected all the new people moving into the development to invent themselves as ‘Impingtoners’, if I can invent that word. It was just, ‘Yep, that’s the development’.”

As for the new facilities that come with the Great Kneighton development, the Kirschners are looking forward to the new doctor’s surgery and they would like to use the guided busway more, when access to the bus stop is eventually improved. But the schools are of little interest to them, since they don’t have children. Jens is also sceptical about the new community square and surrounding shops.

And although much has been made of the 120-acre park that will soon be on their doorstep, Jens is not really interested in green space – nor is he sentimental about the 160 acres of farming land that was sold off by the Pemberton family to make way for the new houses.

“We originally both grew up in the countryside but we didn’t like it,” says Jens. “I used to describe the countryside as too green.”

Although the fields around Chaplen Street used to be filled with skylark’s song, the Kirschners have had only a few birds visit their modest garden since they moved in.

One recently flew into their floor-toceiling windows and broke its neck.

“The pigeons around here are fat,” says Jens. “They’re football shaped and they sit on the aerials and the aerials bend. Pigeons and seagulls to me are flying rats.”

Unlike some of their neighbours in ‘old Trumpington’, Jens and Wencke are not especially interested in looking backwards at the history of what came before them. For example, their street was named after Thomas Chaplen, the Lord of the Manor of Trumpington in the early 1600s. (Chaplen gave Cambridge and the university rights over Hobson’s Brook – the picturesque stream that draws its source from the natural springs of Nine Wells). In fact, it’s fair to say that the Kirschners, in true pioneering fashion, are more interested in looking forwards than looking back.

“I didn’t actually know this place before it was a development,” says Jens. “It’s harder for people who move onto the site to actually know what it was and relate to it in any meaningful way. Plus developers these days do a very good job of obliterating it all.”

As we take a tour around the Kirschners’ gleaming three-storey home with its collection of toy cars and cuddly toys and rows upon rows of books and carefully ordered DVDs, it’s hard not to feel seduced by the idea of moving into a house

that’s brand spanking new – somewhere where nobody else has yet made their mark. The Kirschners certainly know how to make an impression from the moment you walk through the door – with their his and hers stilt-walking suits on full display in the vestibule, all top and tails, white gloves and black top hats. Stilt walking is something they do in their spare time, not that they have too much of that.

Afterword But in true trailblazing style, things can sometimes change more quickly than you expect. When we first met Jens and Wencke in late 2013, they didn’t have any plans to move out of their house any time soon. What they did say is that they definitely didn’t see themselves growing old in Great Kneighton. And that turned out to be extremely prescient….

“I wouldn’t mind buying an old house, but old houses don’t come with sales offices,” says Jens, only half joking.

“It’s the convenience factor.”

Just a few months after we met them, the Kirschners put their house on the market. They moved into rented accommodation in central Cambridge while waiting for the sale to complete. Having been the first people to move into Great Kneighton by about a week, they have now become the first to leave. When asked about the sudden change of direction, they are guarded. But their ultimate ambition is to move back to Germany.

So are the Kirschners happy with their impromptu decision to buy a house in Trumpington?

“When we moved, I was very excited because in the details, this house is very much better than the last one,” says Jens. “We were quite pleased about those details.” They were especially pleased about the size of the enormous windows, even though it was quite a challenge to find curtain poles and curtains that were long enough to fit…

They also love the drive-in garage that leads straight into the house, with its push-button roll up gate. They were not so happy that the walls were calico rather than white, but they can live with that for the time-being. They did have a few teething problems in the first few months after they moved in.

When a concerted email campaign to the developers didn’t have the desired effect, they eventually placed a prominent poster in one of their front windows in full view of prospective buyers complaining about poor customer care. And now, everything seems to be ticking along just nicely. The Kirschners even count some of their new neighbours as friends.

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“Not wishing to be tied up in a house sale whenever the time does come, we decided to sell now and move into rented accommodation in the meantime,” says Jens. “Free to choose the location,...”

Perhaps the attraction of living on the edge of the city began to wane. And perhaps city life holds a greater allure than the suburban streets of Trumpington. Perhaps the steep house price increases in Trum­­pington also had something to do with it, potentially allowing the Kirschners to make a tidy profit from their sale. But hopefully the legacy of Jens and Wencke’s brief time as Great Kneighton’s first residents will live on in the friendships that have been kindled between neighbours at the couple’s get-togethers.

Name Antony Pemberton Age 72 Lives in Trumpington Hall Type of housing Manor house first built circa 1600, with 600 acres of land The Pemberton family have been resident in Trumpington since 1715. They originally came from Pemberton in Lancashire.

Current value undisclosed Favourite place in Trumpington Trumpington Hall

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Antony Pemberton

e d i s y r t n u o C A Proper ty As you sweep up the tree-lined avenue into the impressive circular gravel driveway of Trumpington Hall, it’s like being transported back in time. A time before houses were made with asbestos and pre-fabricated steel frames. A time when Trumpington was home to just 63 families. A time when most of the land around Trumpington was arable fields farmed by tenant farmers. And the Lord of the Manor ruled the roost.

Tucked away on the very western edge of Trumpington village with acres of garden that run down to the reed beds of the River Cam, the imposing Grade II-listed mansion is all red bricks, tall chimneys, sash windows and L-shaped wings draped with purple wisteria.

Lord Chief Justice Sir Francis Pemberton bought Trum­pington Hall and 1,000 acres of land around it for 1,000 guineas in gold pieces back in 1675. The receipt is still in the boxes of family archives to this day. More than 300 years later, the Pemberton family’s ancestral home – with its commanding views over Grantchester Meadows in one direction and the spires of King’s College, Cambridge in the other – is idyllic by any standards. Even the most superlative of estate agent adjectives couldn’t begin to describe a home that has been rumoured to host royal visitors. But today’s occupant, 72-year-old Antony Pemberton, definitely has no intention of selling.

“I love it here,” he says, his eyes sparkling as he gets ready to give us a tour down memory lane. A brief glimpse inside the Pemberton family home is enough to convince any visitor of Trumpington Hall’s impressive credentials. It is certainly spacious, to use estate agent’s hyperbole. In fact, as was the case for many large houses during the Second World War, the hall was turned into a Red Cross Hospital that was home to 1,399 injured soldiers, under the commanding presence of Antony Pemberton’s formidable grandmother, Viola Pemberton.

One of Antony’s first memories as a child is of officers sitting on the veranda.

family-run Trumpington Estate, which tends most of the arable farming land that is still left intact around Trumpington. Many acres have been either sold off for housing or compulsorily purchased since the 1940s.

For generations, the majority of the land owned by the Pemberton family was farmed by tenant farmers. In the early 1900s, the heart of the village still had three working farms. Antony’s father – the late Sir Francis Pemberton – started farming in 1935 and the family’s farming business now manages 3,000 acres of land, some of it beyond Trumpington in other parts of the county.

Since Antony retired in 2007, his oldest son Richard, 43, is now in charge of the day-to-day running of the Trumpington Estate. They sell their high-grade wheat for Warburton’s bread and farm the land with high-tech combine harvesters and state-of-the-art equipment that uses satellite technology to map out the yield of each field, down to the last centimetre. It’s big business.

The farm employs a team of ten staff. They even offer their services as a scenic backdrop for TV films like the recently-screened ITV drama Grantchester.

Tour down memory lane Driving around Trumpington as our impromptu tour guide in his Sunday best tweed suit, silver-haired Antony Pemberton recalls the days when cows used to be driven across Trumpington High Street four times a day – from the grazing land close to Trumpington Hall to be milked at the dairy at the old Manor Farm House, near the site of today’s Village Hall (the land for which was gifted by the Pembertons to the villagers of Trumpington in the early 1900s).

“We had three dairy herds at one point,” he recalls, as his Land Rover negotiates the heavy traffic along the main artery that today carries cars from the M11 into Cambridge.

“It would be rather fun to take cows across the road today,” he says, with a wry smile.

Today, the ancestral Pemberton home has an air of tranquility, with its long corridors leading off into dimly-lit rooms. But it is still at the heart of the Pemberton’s

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s a w te a st e g n si u o h e th l ti “Un s. se u o h w fe y r e v re e w re e th t, il bu

e th d e g n a h c te a st e g n si u o h e Th character of the village.”

He paints a vivid picture of what Trumpington High Street used to look like when he was a boy, before he went up to read agriculture at Trinity College and went on to take over the management of the farm, following in the footsteps of generations of Pembertons before him.

“It didn’t have any traffic lights or anything like that,” he says. “There just wasn’t the quantity of traffic. You never thought about getting stuck in traffic on the way to Cambridge.”

“When I started farming, there was a small field on the High Street (where the main Bidwells building is) where sheep grazed,” he says. “And where the Bidwells building is by the War Memorial, that was a blacksmith,” he remembers.

“The thatched cottage in the High Street had a chap in called Gentle. He was deaf and dumb. When the doorbell rang, a ping pong ball used to swing across his face. He died in the 60s. When we went to clean the house out, we found a service revolver in the bread oven. So he’d probably been in the First World War. Quite a lot of chaps when I first started working had been in the First World War.” “There was a row of cottages here,” he says, as we continue our drive along the High Street. “Until the housing estate was built, there were very few houses,” he says.

“The housing estate changed the character of the village.”

Changing times Back in 1936, six years before Antony was born, the local authority decided to develop 55 acres of Trumpington green belt to build 360 council houses, a recreation ground and allotments. The land belonged to the Pemberton family and was bought under the threat of compulsory purchase for the princely sum of £9,150 in 1939. The war years intervened and building work didn’t begin until after the war had finished. But it was the beginning of the end of Trumpington’s bucolic existence.

Trumpington’s population swelled from just over 1,000 at the turn of the century to more than 6,000 in the 1951 census.

“A lot of the houses on the housing estate were built with asbestos, which was the cheapest building material in 1946,” he continues. “And some of the people who bought

their council houses bought a whole lot of trouble. A lot of the roofs and walls were made of asbestos.”

Antony planted a tree belt including poplar trees on Clay Farm to screen the houses on the council estate and to improve his view from the fields across from the top of the Gog Magogs. It’s a row of trees that today still stands proudly sentinel as a screen between Trumpington estate and the 1940s houses of the new Great Kneighton development on the fields beyond, even though some of them have been felled to make way for the new houses.

A decade after the new Trumpington housing estate was built, the Pembertons were asked to sell off more of their Clay Farm land to make way for Addenbrooke’s Hospital – which now dominates Trumpington’s skyline.

“Most of the original hospital site was compulsorily purchased,” says Antony. “Not quite all. The land for the Frank Lee Centre was gifted by the family for the building of the recreation centre.”

“They started building Addenbrooke’s in the very late 1950s. From memory, the chimney went up in the mid 60s. It went up in 10 days. The shuttering was jacked up an inch every 10 minutes while the tallest mobile crane in Europe poured concrete. The crew who were doing it would be up there for eight hours at a time.

It was scaffolded around the outside. The temperature inside the scaffolding was about 110 degrees. It was a remarkable feat.”

Antony Pemberton also has vivid memories of the Royal Show, the premier agricultural event of the year, which was held on prime Pemberton farming land in 1951, 1960 and 1961. There were livestock displays and machinery demonstrations to entertain visiting dignitaries and local onlookers. The site came to be known as the Showground.

And local people from the Trumpington estate came to work in the kiosks and at the stands to earn some extra money.

“It was THE show in England. It was THE agricultural event,” he recalls. “I came to the 1960 show for the day after I’d finished my A-levels, about a week before I left school. In 1961, I was official chauffeur for the Minister of Agriculture, who was Lord Soames at the time.”

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e k ta to n fu r e th ra e b ld u o w “ It

n to g in p m u r T ss ro c a s w co High Street today…”

“To give you an idea of the scale, they used to move 10,000 sleepers to make the roads every year,” he says.

“They did it all with a very small staff. It was a nightmare farming it afterwards. All the trade stands were tented.

There were so many canvas nails left on the ground, we virtually had to do all the work with crawler caterpillar tractors afterwards to avoid punctures.”

We pause our tour for a moment atop the new Adden­ brooke’s access road that cuts a swathe through what was once prime arable farming land. It was here on Clay Farm that the Royal Show took place. The great hulk of the hospital dominates the horizon, with the rolling hills of the Gog Magogs stretching out behind. And already the new homes of the 2,300-house development called Great Kneighton are springing up where once the Pembertons planted potatoes, sugar beet, wheat, peas and beans and where red-listed birds like yellow hammers and corn buntings once bred.

After the former green belt land on Clay Farm was designated by the City Council for development, the Pembertons sold 160 acres of land to the developers Countryside Properties for an unconfirmed sum. Although the land has been in his family for generations, Antony betrays no visible signs of regret as he surveys the bulldozers and half-built houses stretching as far as the eye can see.

As he drives back up his gravel driveway, past the slightly incongruous petrol pump that was installed in 1935 and the gardener’s house that was built in 1926, he drops his guard and talks proudly about his role as steward of the countryside in the 600 acres of land around his home. It is here that he feels the real emotional pull to his family’s ancestral land. He is proud that his son Richard has carried on the stewardship to recreate 70 acres of water meadows. Already green plovers and little egrets and 14 pairs of herons have come to nest on the fenland that has been painstakingly restored. Over the past 40 years, Antony has been replanting the trees that his father pulled out during his lifetime. He is proud of the job he has done as a professional farmer over the years. And he is proud too that he can still see the dreaming spires of King’s College from Trumpington Hall – he hopes that the same view will still be there for future generations to enjoy.

As he draws up his Land Rover outside the stable block, it’s hard to imagine that, just half a mile away, builders are busy constructing thousands of new homes.

“I just hope they can get the infrastructure sorted out,” he says. “How it’s going to cope with all the extra people, I don’t know…”

Today, Countryside Properties and other housing developers are marketing Great Kneighton as “an investor’s dream”. As well as thousands of new state-of-the-art homes, there will be a new primary and secondary school, a community square with new shops, parks, a library and doctors, not to mention a 120-acre country park being built between Hobson’s Brook and the railway line that runs to London.

When asked what his ancestors might have thought about these new developments, Antony is philosophical, “It’s progress,” he says, as he manoeuvres his Land Rover back into the Trumpington traffic to return back to his corner of England that stands across the River Cam from The Old Vicarage in Grantchester – the very view that homesick World War I poet Rupert Brooke dreamt of when he wrote his famous couplet: “Stands the Church clock at ten to three?

And is there honey still for tea?”

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Name Georgie Morrill & David Willsher Age 31 / 46 Live in Chaplen Street Moved to Trumpington in May 2013 Type of housing Two-bedroom apartment rented from housing association Current value Around £299,000 Current rent £150 per week Favourite place in Trumpington Apart from their home, their favourite place in Trumpington is the beer garden at the Lord Byron, where they like to stop off for a refreshing pint after a Sunday walk to Grantchester.

“ Coming here it definitely feels like home.”

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Georgie Morrill & David Willsher

EVERYONE’S A NEWBIE HERE Before Georgie Morrill and David Willsher moved into their two-bedroom flat on the new Great Kneighton housing development, Trumpington was just somewhere they used to drive through on the way to other places.

It wasn’t somewhere they had ever really stopped. But after David was knocked off his push bike and Georgie fell pregnant, the couple needed to find somewhere else to live -- and fast.

Their previous flat in the north of Cambridge had a “no kid” clause.

When they found themselves at the top of the waiting list for the much coveted affordable housing stock on the new Adobe development in Trumpington, they jumped at the chance. They were one of the first families to move into the newly-built apartment blocks in May 2013 with their 18-month-old son Felix.

There were more builders than neighbours on the estate when Georgie and David first started unpacking their boxes. But it was exciting seeing all the building work going on around them. And they loved the sense of community spirit among the new residents.

“When we first moved in everyone over the road came out and introduced themselves and said hello,” says Georgie. “Within a couple of weeks, we got an invitation to drinks and nibbles. And we went to a BBQ across the way.”

“Everyone’s friendly, even people you don’t know,” adds David.

“Everyone’s on the same page.

Moving somewhere new, it’s the perfect chance to start from scratch.

Everyone’s on the same level. It’s not like moving into an area where people have been living there for 10, 20, 30 years and you feel like the newbie.

Everyone’s a newbie here so everyone makes an effort. Even the builders stop and chat. I cycle to work every day and I say hello four times before I even reach the roundabout. We wanted somewhere with some kind of community spirit.”

Their new flat couldn’t be more convenient for David, who works a few minutes’ bike ride away at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. But it wasn’t just the convenience factor that most impressed him.

“When we were looking for somewhere to live, we didn’t look here because we had a fear that it would be like every other new development we’d seen,” he says. “We thought it would be horrific, not somewhere we’d be interested in.

It wasn’t on the top of our list. But as we found out more about this, we saw it had potential – to create something new, incorporating old values.”

“It’s really amazing,” he says. “This road is turning into that exact blueprint, with balconies, people saying hello, walking down cobbled streets...”

“I’ve lived in places before where everyone was shut down and no one spoke to anyone,” he adds. “It was horrible.

There were communal gardens but they weren’t used. You’d go out there and there were curtains twitching…

But even though we’re quite on top of each other here, it kind of works…”

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When we first meet Georgie, David and Felix, six months after they moved in, their flat already has the cosy feel of somewhere well loved and homely. They have just bought an old-fashioned wooden fireplace on Gumtree and they’re planning to get a fake fire too. The vinyl flooring looks almost like natural wood under cosy rugs. The open plan kitchenette living room is the perfect space for watching over a fast-growing toddler. The two double bedrooms are both a good size. There’s a balcony overlooking the street (and their neighbour’s living room). In the summer, Georgie took a paddling pool out onto the balcony for Felix to splash around in. And there’s a small study room plastered with posters that doubles up as a hub for the couple’s main passion – organising gigs (Georgie is the lead singer in an all-girl punk band called Beverley Kills and David has been putting on concerts in and around Cambridge for as long as he can remember.) The couple’s only gripe is that the bathroom doesn’t have a window. And the stairs…

“I’d prefer a house with a garden,” admits Georgie. “It is difficult, specially when you’ve got a little ’un and you’re on the first floor and you’ve got the stairs to contend with. “I know it sounds silly but it’s quite a struggle, when you’ve got a child, a buggy and bags of shopping to carry every day.”

But stairs aside, David and Georgie already feel totally at home in their new surroundings.

“ The old English way is: y m t n a w I , n e rd a g y m t n a w I castle, I want my car…”

“Coming here it definitely feels like home,” says David, who grew up in Chesterton, on the other side of Cambridge. “It feels like a proper place to live. Before we moved in, when I saw the pictures, I thought this is my dream. There’s going to be a country park and a plaza with a community centre. It’s amazing.

There’s a huge potential for putting on concerts – and I’d like to be involved because organising concerts is what I do.”

“People who hear about it but don’t see it have preconceptions. But this seems to be well planned,” says David, who is at pains to point out that both he and Georgie are working and don’t receive any government money. Georgie works as an administrator for the Medical Research Council while David works as a facility manager for Cancer Research UK at Addenbrooke’s.

They pay a market rent of £150 per week for their flat, which is a little more expensive than the social housing that is also dotted throughout the estate alongside the affordable housing stock and the private houses.

“In Cambourne they had a social problem,” says David. “They almost split the town between those who bought and people who lived in social/affordable housing. Here they’re trying to do it the right way.

Here they’ve tried to mix everyone together.”

“We’re not against people in social housing,” he says.” There are good and bad people. We just want everyone to get on. Life is difficult enough without making your homeland uncomfortable.”

So did the couple feel any antagonism from the existing residents of Trum­ pington when they moved in?

“It never even crossed my mind moving here that would be the case,” says Georgie, who admits that she hasn’t mixed much with Trumpington residents beyond Great Kneighton so far.

“We’ve walked along the High Street, to Waitrose, Grantchester,” adds David.

“We’ve never felt anything. There are two sides – and this has created so much essential housing. Housing has to be built somewhere. But you see some people who’ve lived along Shelford Road for years who used to have a view towards Addenbrooke’s chimneys. Now they’ve got a view of flats right against their gardens. It’s a huge shock for people. No one wants that kind of change on their doorstep.”

David believes the fact that the new houses and flats of Great Kneighton are rising upwards, rather than sprawling outwards mitigates some of the impact of building on former green belt land.

“Going up is frowned on in Cambridge,” he says. “I’ve lived in London and I’ve visited some places in Denmark where there’s social housing that goes up high. I think it works. There’s more space for greenery.”

“The old English way is: I want my garden, I want my castle, I want my car,” he adds. “We’re an island. We can only do that for so long before we run out of space.”

David and Georgie only disagree on one thing when it comes to Great Kneigh­ ton. While he likes the look and feel of the new houses, Georgie isn’t so keen.

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“Some of the buildings are very blocky,” she says. “There are lots of straight lines and it’s not very aesthetically pleasing. But at least they’ve started putting trees in now.”

In spite of their artistic differences, David and Georgie both agree that they feel like Trumpington residents after just six months of living here.

They’re looking forward to visiting the new country park, when it opens. And they’re already enjoying exploring their new neighbourhood.

“There are places we never knew existed because previously we’d just pass in a car,” says David. “You’d just see the façade of everywhere. I had no idea the allotments were there.

It was a shock when we walked through there for the first time.

We couldn’t believe there were lots of hens and chickens! And the guided busway is a huge deal – it’s like an artery.”

During the summer they used to walk up and down the path that runs alongside the busway into Cambridge and the railway station.

“It’s really nice,” says Georgie. “I mean, when we first moved here, it’s one of the first walks I took my parents on. I was like, come and check out the guided busway! It’s amazing. You feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere.”

David is a little more circumspect, especially since he broke his pelvis a few years ago after being knocked off his bike. He’s alert to the dangers of the guided buses speeding through the neighbourhood at up to 55mph without any fencing as it whizzes past cyclists and

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“We wanted somewhere with some kind of community spirit.”

pedestrians using the path beside it. (Already there has been one serious collision between a cyclist and a bus.)

“First of all, there should be a fence down the side of it because it’s dangerous,” says David. “If you come off your bike and go over that kerb, you’re not going home for Christmas. I’ve seen cyclists swerve in and out of it. The closer you get to Hills Road, the scarier it gets.

You feel the rush when it comes past at high speed.”

The couple appreciate the fields and mini-lakes alongside the busway – even though they’re aware that some of these fields are living on borrowed time as more and more of the former farming land is flattened to make way for the community square, a new secondary school and the rest of the 2,300 homes.

Both Georgie and David’s impressions of Trumpington have now changed completely – from a place that they just used to pass through to a place they are definitely happy to call home.

“Years ago, Trumpington estate had the connotation that it was a rough place to go,” says David.

“I was a huge BMX cyclist all around town and you wouldn’t go into the park in Trumpington because it was too rough. But now there are some beautiful houses. I wouldn’t mind living there.”

“I think Trumpington is such a strange design,” he adds. “The high street is so super busy. It’s a main road, so it’s not a place people want to hang out.

But if you go beyond Waitrose towards Grantchester, that’s really nice around there. That’s one of our favourite walks in the summer.”

“On that farmland that goes down to Grantchester Meadows, when the sun sets it looks like the most amazing place to live,” he says. “It makes us feel quite lucky.”

The only thing that’s missing, they say, is a row of decent shops, which they hope will come when the new community square is built.

“It would be nice to have an indepen­ dent shop, a bakery, a delicatessen – with fresh bread delivered,” says David. “Where we used to live, the shopkeeper at the corner shop used to put four bread rolls aside for me if I was a bit late on a Saturday morning.

It’s little things like that that make a difference – they’re nothing but they’re everything. And they really make your day.”

In time, David would love to see the community square for Trumpington become as vibrant as Cambridge’s Market Square – giving residents somewhere to hang out that’s not just a thoroughfare.

“In Cambridge city centre, in spite of all the amazing architecture and the university, still the most amazing place to go is the market place,” he says.

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“Walk around the market place on a Sunday and people are talking to each other and saying ‘hello’, ‘how are you doing’. You’re discussing things, you’re laughing at things…”

“A market place would be incredible,” he says. “As a community, you can support these things.”

Georgie dreams of a thriving community hub a bit like the centre of Fulbourn, where she grew up.

“Fulbourn’s got the most incredible village centre that’s got something for everyone – from toddlers to kids who want to skate to people who just want to hang round and watch football on a Sunday afternoon and drink a few beers. They’ve got everything.”

But for now David and Georgie are content with building the community on their own doorstep – biding their time for the rest of the building work to be completed.

And spending more time getting to know their neighbours.

“When the building has calmed down in this vicinity, I think there’ll definitely be a street party,” says David. “We used to live in an old street in the middle of Cambridge and they used to have street parties there. I think next summer we could well have a street party down here. I can see that happening.”

Name Name Ceri Galloway Age Age 63 LivesLives in in Foster Road Moved to trumpington in in 2003 Moved to Trumpington TypeType of housing of housing Three-bedroom terraced former council house, built in 1947 Current value Around £310,000 (according to Zoopla) Favourite place in trumpington Favourite place in Trumpington Nine Wells – a nature reserve with several chalk springs that form the source of Hobson’s Conduit, which carries water along Hobson’s Brook into the heart of Cambridge.

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Ceri Galloway

r o f f e i r g l e e f I

e c a l p f o s s o l e h t

When 63-year-old Ceri Galloway first moved to the post-war estate in Trumpington, it wasn’t the house she fell in love with, it was the green space and the potential she saw in the land surrounding it – the 140-foot garden that ran down to flourishing allotments set up on City Council-owned land when the houses were built; the plot of sandy earth that was set aside for chicken keeping; the disused railway line that was once designated a Cambridge County Wildlife Site; the belt of tall trees where owls and sparrowhawks roosted; Hobson’s Brook, which was home to kingfishers; and hundreds of acres of farmland that stretched out from the railway line towards Addenbrooke’s Hospital and the Gog Magog Hills beyond, providing a perfect breeding ground for RSPB red-listed birds like corn buntings, skylarks, grey partridges and yellow hammers.

“When I first came here I really felt like I’d been called to be here,” says Ceri. “I used to go out there to connect with the land, to walk it. I loved that whole concept, the importance of recognising the ancestral history of the land and the importance of place to people as individuals. It’s what makes us feel grounded. The soil itself is what feeds us.”

“For me the land carries the knowledge of our ancestors,” she says. “We know that there have been people living here since pre-historic times because of all the archaeological excavations that have been done. There have been people living here in just about every period since the Neolithic era. That’s all imbued in the land here.”

After moving from London to the Fens just over 14 years ago, Ceri and her partner Dave were looking for a home in Cambridge that was closer to Dave’s work as a specialist nurse. Somewhere that had some land. Somewhere with a sense of community. A place where they could create a more sustainable future – where they could grow more of their own fruit and vegetables. A place where they could build a life in a community where they felt supported.

And a good place to grow old gently.

“When we came here and saw this garden leading down to the chicken plots and the allotments, we thought ‘this is somewhere with real potential to create our dream of becoming more self sufficient,’” she recalls, ushering us into her house crammed full with books and seedlings

and drying-out seeds that nestle in baskets among piles of well-thumbed files and newspapers.

“We put in an offer and the day the offer was accepted, we went down to the allotment to sign up for a plot, because we had to get our onions in!” she says – red and black patterned trousers and well-worn T-shirt set off by a tousle of salt and pepper hair and soil-weathered hands.

Nesting instinct Ceri and Dave bought their three-bedroom house in 2003 for around £155,000 from former council tenants who got the option of owning their home through Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s right-to-buy policy. The couple got to work to make their new home as eco-friendly as possible by insulating it from top to bottom. Then they set about installing a wind-powered domestic micro-generator with a wind turbine that whirs away next to the chimney on the end gable of the house; they invested in solar panels to heat their water, later adding photo voltaic panels that provide electricity. And they installed a woodstove in the living room that keeps the house cosy through the winter months and heats their water all year round. They hardly ever need to turn the central heating on. In the summer, they sell electricity back to the national grid. And for the winter months, they collect a stash of local wood to keep their woodstove burning. Much of it sits in a large woodshed in the garden and an unruly pile appears in the front garden as if by magic as neighbours drop off wood they don’t need.

Ceri and Dave also threw themselves into the local allotment community – working hard to establish their own plot and getting to know their neighbours along the way.

It wasn’t long before their enthusiasm earned them a place on the allotment committee. Today, they grow around 50-75% of their own veg on their two allotment plots – onions, potatoes, cabbages, leeks, beans and peas, courgettes and pumpkins, and most of the fruit they eat, with harvests shared from neighbours’ gardens too. This summer they picked 20 lbs of strawberries from their plots in just one week. They make a point of eating food that’s in season and try not to go to the supermarket, if they can help it. They supplement their home-grown produce with food from the Sunday market in the centre of Cambridge.

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Dave even helped to set up some bee hives on the allotments, so they harvest their own local honey too.

Three years after they had moved to Trumpington, Ceri decided to give up her job as an occupational therapist because she was becoming increasingly concerned about climate change. Not only did she want to focus on reducing her own carbon footprint, but she also wanted to work with other people to explore what she calls a “one-planet lifestyle”. Although the drop in family income was scary at first, she was motivated by the prospect of learning to become more efficient at growing food, as well as helping to develop local organisations that support people to make their lifestyles more carbon neutral. For the past ten years, she has been a local green activist and a candidate for the Green Party in Trumpington.

Ceri became a founding member of Transition Cambridge – a local group of the worldwide organisation that wants to build people’s resilience to combating climate change.

Together with three other women, she set up a chicken co-operative on the sandy land at the bottom of her garden (they keep around 20 chickens between them). While she was Vice Chair of the Trumpington Residents Association, she was a champion in discussions about whether to get involved in planning the refurbishment and management of the Pavilion building as a community partner with the council. And she also initiated the idea of a community orchard on a patch of disused earth between the chicken coops and the allotments that had been used for fly-tipping for decades. She worked together with neighbours Susanna Colaco and Lance Routledge to bring the project to life.

Common ground “When we first moved here, there was an empty piece of land,” she explains. “Dave and I used to go and just sit there sometimes and feel blessed that there was all this green space around us. Quite early on I thought, I’ve been wanting to start a community orchard and this would be a fantastic space for it.”

After protracted negotiations with the City Council and the Allotment Society, Ceri, Susanna and Lance got the green light to set up the Trumpington Community Orchard Project. They got some grants from the City Council and a BBC Breathing Space lottery grant to start the ball rolling.

This helped to pay for contractors to come and clear the

fly-tipped rubbish, as well as building the paling fence and a gate, and sowing short grass seed and wildflowers.

The local community and voluntary organisations did the rest of the work – volunteers were trained up to plant and prune the apple trees and manage the site. The original hedgerow that had become a leggy tree line was laid in a traditional method used since Medieval times to create a habitat that attracts birds and insects. And nesting boxes were installed to encourage birds and bats to take up residence – including a swift box with solar-powered recording equipment that plays swift calls to attract birds to nest there. Today, the orchard has become a well-loved community asset – for people and wildlife alike. The project organises regular maintenance sessions every second Sunday of the month – as well as annual events like the Wassailing ceremony, a traditional blessing on the Twelfth Night of Christmas to promote a good harvest for the year ahead.

“We worked together to create a nice space and a pocket park,” says Ceri. “Lots of people who live in the community are very involved with it. I think it’s been well used.

But since they’ve put the guided busway in, the magic and peace of the place isn’t the same. Now it feels like a special place that’s boundaried by artificial light and technology.”

Ceri’s grief is palpable as she talks about the guided busway that was built along the disused railway line once teeming with wildlife that runs just behind her beloved community orchard and the allotments at the bottom of her garden. It was a prelude to the Great Kneighton development that is now being built on the arable farming land beyond.

“We’ve concreted over nature,” she says. “We’ve actually buried a stream on the busway. We don’t get any frogs in our garden any more. We also get road kill because they didn’t make any passages underneath the busway for the hedgehogs and small mammals. There were two fox families and badgers in the cutting. The contractors dug the badgers out and chased them away before they started building the busway.”

“I find it harder to go in the orchard these days unless it’s a work day and then I always go and look over the fence and look at the guided busway. On week days, I go to the allotment and I spend half my time thinking ‘Oh for God’s sake, stop making all that noise!’ when I hear all the constant

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bleeping from the diggers and the screaming power tools while all the building work’s going on.”

Ceri feels a similarly deep-rooted sense of grief and anger as she watches the 2,300 new houses being built brick by brick on the Great Kneighton development.

“When we moved here, we paid for an extended survey to check for any potential issues and hazards,” she says.

“The City Council did not flag up any development.

Four weeks after we moved in, the plans were put forward.

I used to walk around feeling furious. I used to say to the planning officers: ‘the impact this is going to have on the community is going to be enormous on an emotional level’. The impact on the local population isn’t even taken into consideration.”

Walking the land “I used to walk there in those fields,” she says, gesturing beyond the end of her garden to where the diggers are now busy preparing the ground for a new community square that will include a five-storey building with a community centre.

“There were permitted pathways across to Nine Wells,” she says. “If Pemberton had crops in there, obviously I wouldn’t walk through his crops,” she adds, referring to the landowner Antony Pemberton who recently sold 160 acres of Clay Farm land to Great Kneighton’s developers for an unconfirmed sum. The same land was originally bought by Pemberton’s ancestors for one thousand guineas back in 1675.

“In the 1800s, the wealthy people in the community were able to pay for an act of parliament to enclose the land.

As a result, land across the country then became owned by something like three or four percent of the population,” says Ceri.1 “That’s had huge implications for future generations in terms of employment, housing and access to land for food production. People don’t have access to the land any more, which is a big problem in this country.”

“I used to walk to Nine Wells on a regular basis,” she says.

“I can’t get there anymore because we’re not allowed on that land, you know. They’ve blocked off the gates on the railway line and the path is closed. The land belongs to the developers and we have no right to go there since it was sold. Some people were actually threatened with

prosecution for walking on the land there. You can see some of the walkers have cut the wires to be able to walk their dogs, which shows people’s unhappiness about the land being shut away from us.”

Ceri is still grieving for the loss of the green space that first attracted her to Trumpington ten years ago.

“When I used to come through the gate at the railway line coming back from Addenbrooke’s,” she says, “I used to cycle across in the dark – there was no light. You’d come across there in the dark and the stars were bright in the sky. Other nights, the mist was so thick you could barely see where you were going. But you’d hear the running water from the culvert. And you could still see little animals running across your path.”

“I feel grief – for the loss of place,” admits Ceri. “Even though we’ll have that green wedge in the middle, it’s going to be so overshadowed by those tall buildings on the Addenbrooke’s site that come up to the railway line.

And when you turn to face the other way, all this new development when you look at it, it looks like a prison from a distance. Someone called it ‘The Barracks’ the other day. I mean, the actual design is so uninspiring. You talk to the council about it and they say the developers have made these demands on the designs. You talk to the developers and they say the council say we have to do it like this, and you think no-one’s being straight with you.”

“The relationship between the landowner and the developer means that we can’t plan for future generations,” she says. “It’s not like the City Council can look at the needs of the city because it’s the developers and the landowners that make the decisions, and planning is limited by that relationship.”

“If we want to take climate change seriously, these buildings need to be built in such a way that they’re going to create communities that will be sustainable,” she continues. “They’re building houses that are not carbon neutral, without gardens. There’s nowhere for small 1. The enclosure of the parish of Tumpington was instigated by F.C.J. Pemberton in 1801 and the parish was enclosed by Act of Parliament in 1809. The Pemberton estate at Trumpington Hall was allocated 1,163 acres – around 70% of the parish. The Anstey estate at Anstey Hall was allocated 378 acres (20% of the parish). The next largest lay owner (the village blacksmith) was allocated 15 acres and other smallholders were allocated just 18.5 acres between them. The vicar and parish and university college were allocated around 106 acres. (Information courtesy of Trumpington Local History Group)

habitorials Issue 0 – Ceri Galloway { Page 33 }

businesses to start up so people can work close to home.

The shops will be run by big chains because they will be too expensive for people to rent. How are people going to feed themselves without space to grow food, and if we build on good farm land in the green belt? These houses on the Trumpington estate were all built in the 1940s with gardens big enough to grow your own food because they were worried about food production after the war.

Today, we’re living a three-planet life-style, using up enough resources for three times the people living here. We need to localise.”

“My dream was that one day the industrialised agricultural farm land of Clay Farm would be used for more biodiverse methods of food production in future,” she says. “It hurts to see it when planning is so short term. We are not taking future generations and the future of our planet into consideration.”

Ceri is also concerned about who the new houses of Great Kneighton are being built for. Even the so-called affordable housing on the new development is too expensive for many local families to buy, she says, even on the shared ownership schemes. Prices on the Abode development range from £375,000 for a two-bedroom house to £900,000 for a six-bedroom home. And some of the most expensive luxury mansions on the Aura development are being marketed for upwards of £2 million.

“One of my main concerns about the effect of the development on where we live is the gentrification,” she says. “I’m really mad at Countryside, you know. They’re advertising in the railway station and national newspapers to commuters. The council are telling us these houses are for people working in Cambridge who’ve got nowhere to live. Then Countryside are advertising the houses to commuters. I’m opposed to that.”

I’d like to paint over the words ‘Great Kneighton’ Another example of not taking local people’s considerations into account, she adds, is the marketing name of the new housing estate as ‘Great Kneighton’.

“I’d like to go down there and paint over some of those signs,” she says. “I’d like to paint over the words ‘Great Kneighton’ and then write in black lettering ‘Trumpington’.

This is Trumpington; the developers are enforcing this name on us… They could have called it ‘Clay Farm’.

What’s wrong with Clay Farm? Clay Farm is the name of this place and has been for centuries.”

Ceri admits that she thinks about moving out of Trumpington most weeks. It pains her to see all the changes going on to the land she used to love so much.

“It’s just too painful to watch,” she says. “I want to be somewhere where there are big trees, real trees. The only big trees round here were on the council-owned field by the track from Foster Road to the guided busway. The council promised us they wouldn’t be cut down. But Countryside just came along one day and they just cut them down because they were ‘in the way’. It was like a spear through my heart.”

“We have so few really wild places in Cambridgeshire,” she adds. “Cambridgeshire is the county with the least number of trees in the UK and they cut down these trees! If they had been more carefully planned into the community development, they would have given so much to the new people living here. Now they’re gone, there’s just one beech tree lying on the ground all grown over with weeds at the moment.”

Ceri is also concerned for the potential loss of community – as the tentacles of Trumpington begin to extend outwards from the estate where she lives and into the new houses of the Great Kneighton and Trumpington Meadows developments, swelling the ward’s population from around 7,000 today to a predicted 17,500 over the next decade.

“Trumpington is still essentially a village, even though we’re on the outskirts of the city,” she says. “We have a church and a residents’ association and lots of local clubs and societies. We even have a WI. In a way, you want to move on in the modern world. But at the same time we are losing our sense of place. How can we retain our sense of community when we’re growing so fast? We are being capped by an urban environment. There has been no effort made to blend the houses into the existing environment on the rural fringe.”

The thing that still binds Ceri to Trumpington though is the sense of community.

“What keeps me here is my friends and relationships,” she says. “I know most of my neighbours. This is a fantastic community, particularly within the Allotment Society.

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When I first moved here, people came and knocked on my door, introduced themselves, invited me in to their houses.

I haven’t lived somewhere like that since I was a little kid in the 1950s.”

“If we’re interested in doing something about climate change, we will have to scale our lives down to working and playing within a very short distance of where we live,” she adds. “So the people who live near you are the most important people because they sustain you and that’s part of survival: sharing. My neighbours are sharing people, they share with you emotionally and they share vegetables with each other – I’ve got some apples and somebody else has got courgettes, you know what I mean?”

“What’s interesting about this street is there are about six houses with solar panels,” she says. “We’re people who have made choices; we’ve made choices not to do the things that make lots of money. We’ve made choices to have enough time to be able to have relationships and to create community. This is what we need to bring other people around to, because in terms of survival of the planet we’re going to have to live more like this.”

Ceri is also worried that the building of Great Kneighton will start to push up house prices in the Trumpington estate where she lives and drive out the people who can afford to live there now. Her neighbours are a mixture of private renters, council tenants and homeowners – or ‘owner-occupiers’, as she calls them.

“Not everyone is an owner-occupier,” she says. “There are three generations of families living on the estate, some have bought their own houses and some are still council tenants. That brings stability and economic balance to the community, although there’s hardship here too. Some of the children and grandchildren of the original residents can’t live here because they can’t afford to. They feel marooned from their family in places like Cambourne.”

It’s too late to turn back the clock But in spite of her grief, in some ways Ceri is now strangely resigned to Trumpington’s fate. In the early days of the planning discussions, she used to ask people she met what they thought about the new development and they used to say ‘There’s nothing we can do. Building on some of this land next to the estate has been planned since the Pembertons first sold it to the council in the 1940s’. People felt

disempowered by what was going on around them, she says, and they didn’t engage with it. And now, she says, it’s too late to turn back the clock. The planning applications have gone through; the council is unable to oppose the developers’ plans; and the government has set targets for more and more houses to be built in the south east without looking at resolving the wider economic factors at play across the whole of the country.

“If you think of all the kids on this estate who played out in those fields,” she says. “They grew up there. If you ask them about it, if you ask some of the young adults visiting their parents on the estate, that’s what they talk about.

They played on the fields, in the bits they were allowed to go in. And they’d like their kids to be able to do the same thing.”

Ceri has idyllic memories of her own childhood – roaming wild in the meadows around her home in Cirencester with a fishing net and a jam jar. And she fears that age of innocence is slowly being eroded as she watches the nature beyond her back garden become industrialised, sterile and covered in concrete.

“When I was 11, I used to run across the fields and see cowslips as far as the eye could see,” she says. “And in the summer the butterflies used to fly up out of the grass in their thousands. Back in the 1960s, Rachel Carson tried to alert us to her concerns about the loss of biodiversity in her book Silent Spring. And we are still waiting for change – we’re creating this silent, unnatural world because nature and biodiversity is not part of our plan.”

For Ceri, there really is a sense that the future she imagined when she first moved to Trumpington is disappearing before her eyes.

“It’s going to happen whether we like it or not,” she sighs.

“We are in danger of losing what we had: a living community. We will be separated from each other and become like any other big city. We’ll become an urban extension of Cambridge, and not living on a human scale. Already the developers are pushing to build on the remaining green belt between us and the motorway, which is something we asked them not to do. It’s just incredibly sad.”

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Name Monica Leal Age 38 Lives in Royal Way Moved to Trumpington in August 2013 Type of housing Four-bedroom semi-detached house Current value Around £525,000 (according to Zoopla) Favourite place in Trumpington My favourite part of Trumpington is to walk with my husband along the cycle path way, and to go for dinner/drink at the Green Man. I also love the white flats in the new Aura development – they just remind me of Le Corbusier French architecture. I also enjoy seeing the stars at night from my window – I couldn’t do that when I lived in town.

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Monica Leal

WINDOW ONTO D L R O W R E H T ANO

When Monica Leal first saw the field where her future house would be built on the new Great Kneighton development, it was just a pile of stones and soil. The 38-year-old Mexican native was taking part in an archaeological dig as part of her degree course at the University of Cambridge. She helped to unearth Roman coins and skulls, bronze bangles and arrow heads – evidence that the fields of Clay Farm had been used as agricultural land for thousands of years.

“I never thought we were going to buy a house here,” says Monica, sitting now in her super-chic kitchen with the autumnal light streaming in through the slatted blinds. Her cat sits curled up cosily on a wicker chair. Orchids bloom on pristeen surfaces. Iconic Mexican artefacts nestle alongside piles of well-loved books on subjects ranging from medicine to ancient Egypt. And inviting cushions are piled up on neutral-toned sofas against bare laminated wood floors. It’s a mixture of stylish sharp lines, Bridget Riley stripes and homely soft furnishings – a scene that wouldn’t look out of place in a trendy interior design magazine. Bare light bulbs and the sound of builders hammering away outside the floor-to-ceiling windows are the only hint that this house has only been built for just over a year.

“I love the inside of the house,” says Monica, in her heavily accented Mexican lilt. “I feel it’s very special – very warm and spacious. Every time I arrive and see this house, I feel happy. I love the big windows.”

The story of how Monica arrived from her native Mexico to the new Great Kneighton development is an epic tale.

She grew up in the bustling northern Mexican city of Monterrey – one of four children in a close-knit and well-to-do family who made their fortune selling catering equipment to small restaurants. When she was just 16, she met her husband-to-be Nestor because they both shared the same hairdresser.

Nestor came from the other side of the mountain – both geographically and economically speaking. He was one of the first in his family to go to university. When Monica met him, he was just finishing his degree in IT. Before long, Nestor was snapped up by an IT company that has since become one of the biggest IT businesses in Latin America. When he was offered the opportunity to transfer to Houston in Texas, the couple (who were married by then) jumped at the chance. Their first son, Marcelo, was just six months old.

Their second son, Patricio, who’s now 15, was born while they were living in the United States. After three years, they were offered the chance to move to either New York or Madrid. Monica takes up the story: “For us, it was more attractive to live in Madrid,” she says. “It was supposed to be for three months but it was a year. I loved the shops and the food but it was difficult to make friends with Spanish people. Instead we had English, French, Italian and South African friends.”

When Nestor was offered a different job – this time just outside London – they had to up sticks again. They decided to move to Milton Keynes, which was close to Nestor’s new office.

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“Our options were Northampton, St Albans, Luton and Milton Keynes,” she says. “And because we were coming from the United States and then Madrid, the more familiar place was Milton Keynes. It felt very organised and at that moment, that’s why we chose to live in Milton Keynes.”

Monica’s experience of moving to Milton Keynes was diametrically opposed to the cool reception she’d received from locals in Madrid.

“People were super friendly,” she says. “They were friendly with people of any sex, any religion, any age. I was really impressed… It was my first country I could see that.

Neighbours did care about you.”

After six years in Milton Keynes they decided to move again to live closer to Nestor’s office. It was while Monica was researching the best areas to live in London (she had already settled on Putney) that she started doing her degree in archaeology at the University of Cambridge. She was driving across from Milton Keynes to Cambridge every day while her boys were at school. And it was then that it dawned on her that Cambridge might just be the right place for her family.

“I thought it looks like a nice town,” she says. “I started checking schools and houses. And very quickly we made the decision that Cambridge was better for the price. It could offer us the same as London but safer and a lot cheaper. That’s why we moved.”

“We moved to a little flat by the river,” she says. “It was amazing to move from Milton Keynes to a place where every morning I could see the view across to Magdalene College.”

That was in 2007. It took another seven years for Monica and Nestor to finally find a house they wanted to buy in Cambridge. They rented a Victorian house on Grafton Street in the centre of town for a while, and Monica loved it – even though it was a bit drafty. She loved the sense of history – living in the same nineteenth-century house where a Spanish civil war activist had once lived and the Spanish poet García Lorca had visited; and in the same street as the former head of the Church of England. She loved being able to walk into town to the shops.

And the sense of community.

In their quest to find the perfect house in the perfect location, the couple must have put around ten offers on houses in and around Cambridge – but they got outbid on most of them by cash buyers coming up from London with deep pockets and an appetite for buy-tolet properties. Over those five or six years, Monica and Nestor watched

property prices in Cambridge rise by almost a third. They knew that the longer they left it, the more costly it would be for them to get onto the property ladder again. Monica wanted to live in the centre of town, within walking distance of the shops, and she was happy to live in an older house that needed renovating. But her husband had other ideas.

“My husband came cycling [around Trumpington] at the weekends and was trying to persuade me to buy a new house,” recalls Monica. “I always said they’re beautiful, but I don’t care.

I prefer to live in a tiny one bedroom flat in the middle of the city. I don’t want to cycle. I want my neighbours around me… I didn’t want to live so far away from town.”

“Just to please him we came one weekend,” she says. “But this house was not open so we saw the next door house, the show home. I still thought I’d prefer a house in downtown.” Then a four-bedroom house on Royal Way came up – so Monica decided to come and look at it one afternoon on her own, after teaching a Spanish lesson.

She fell in love with it there and then.

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“At the moment I came, I did like this house,” she says. “I especially liked the big window on the second floor and the way it felt here.”

So she called her husband straight away and went to the sales office to put in an offer. But there was a problem. The sales office was about to close for the evening, and another vendor already had the house on hold.

Eventually, after a few frantic phone calls, everything was resolved.

Monica paid “a little deposit of £500 or £1,000 that you’d lose if you don’t go ahead” and Nestor came to complete all the paperwork at 8 o’clock the next morning, on his way to work. The family finally moved into their new house in August 2013.

Home from home So has Monica been pleased with her decision so far?

“It’s a very comfortable and warm house,” she says. “But it’s noisy because they are building right next to my house. The worst thing is that on Saturday at 8am came another team of builders who aren’t as careful as the other guys. They started

“ Every time I arrive and see this house, I feel happy.

I love the big windows.”

throwing bricks down from the third floor into the container.”

“I understand it will be finished in two months,” she says. “The house next door is exactly the same as this one. It’s been sold and I’m really looking forward to meeting my neighbours.”

She’s pleased that the Abode development where she lives recently won a Housing Design Award, promoted by organisations like RIBA and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. The jury were apparently particularly impressed by the simple palette of materials used and “a hierarchy of spaces and housing types to suit different parts of the development”.

The one thing though that Monica feels is still in need of further work in her award-winning neighbourhood is the community spirit.

“If I compare when I was living in Grafton Street, that was amazing,” she says. “Everyone was so friendly.

Neighbours came and knocked on your door. There were street parties and there was a contest for the best window box. There were about five streets. So it was quite nice, you

know, because I feel like they were family. For many times I’m on my own because my husband has to travel.

There were three weeks that I was on my own with the children, but I knew that any moment I could call them or knock on their door if I needed anything.”

“ I feel in Shelford there is far more community feeling.”

And although she has got to know some of her new neighbours – some of them through Jens and Wencke’s drinks and nibbles parties down the road on Chaplen Street – she feels a bit cut off from the rest of Cambridge. She would prefer it if she could just walk across Jesus Green and pick up a coffee. And her sons still haven’t met many local

habitorials Issue 0 – Monica Leal { Page 39 }

teenagers yet, preferring to travel across town to meet up with their old friends instead.

“I go often to Waitrose,” says Monica. “Although they’re not the best prices, you know. I wish Sainsbury’s was there instead of Waitrose! But I have my free coffee.

I use the post office [on Anstey Way].

I like to walk around the country park and I like to see the ducks.

And sometimes I go to Shelford.

And I feel in Shelford there is far more community feeling.”

“I use the dry cleaners [in Shelford],” she says. “They’re really, really friendly those people. They’re always happy. And there’s a little Co-op across the road where I can go and get my eggs or my milk.

But here I feel completely isolated.”

“I think it will be better (eventually) but it’s not as good as living in town,” she adds. “Maybe what I like is developments designed around people walking, like in old times.

These areas have been designed to use more cars. I know there’s public transport and you can use a bike. But you need a car here.”

We’re used to noise & people And she would prefer the bustle of a big city around her.

uncle would give them a job in politics. They are quite powerful people.

I think it’s similar here.”

“We’re from a huge city,” she says.

“Monterrey has 10 million people.

We’re used to that – to hearing noise and dogs and people.”

“For me to see this group [Nestor’s friends], they were economically not so high up, but they were OK. They were so independent and they were doing everything they wanted,” she says. “They did care about what their families say or do but they had more flexibility. Many of them are very successful.”

When her Mum visited Cambridge a few years ago, she said “you live like in a postcard but it’s a bit boring.”

And when her mother-in-law came to visit, she wanted to go home after just two days.

“She said, ‘it’s amazingly beautiful and I can see a lot of money spent but I don’t care. I want to go back’,” says Monica. “She went to Jesus Green. She went there for three weeks and she stood there for three weeks smoking her cigarettes and no one approached her. In Mexico, people start talking to you. Where my mother in law lives it’s a huge community. People really look after each other.”

So does she miss her native Mexico at all?

“I miss Mexico but I don’t feel we can go back now,” she says.

“We want our sons to finish their studies here.”

Most of Monica’s friends and family still live out in Mexico and some of them are highly successful.

Especially some of Nestor’s friends, many of whom have made their own fortunes.

“I still have a big, huge group of friends,” she says. “Many of the people I grew up with, their dad gave them jobs in business. Or their

Monica, who was raised as a strict Catholic, admits that it has been hard for her to get used to the different way of life in Europe. But she has surprised herself.

I’m amazing at adapting “It was hard at the beginning to adapt,” she says. “But I would say I’m amazing at adapting. I’ve really impressed myself. I have Mexican friends here and they are living here but their mind is still in Mexico. If you’re living in England, you live here. My husband said, ‘Are you sure you want to move to Madrid where you don’t know anyone?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I’ll make friends.’

And I did. Like I have here. Wherever I have to go – China, Middle East, Saudi Arabia – I will make friends.”

So does Monica feel that her sons have better opportunities growing up in Cambridge than they would have had in Mexico?

“Maybe they have the same opportunities,” she says. “It’s just a mentality that will be better for them to grow up here.

To be in a multi-cultural place.”

Both of Monica’s sons speak perfect Queen’s English and consider themselves more English than Mexican.

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Sometimes it surprises Monica to hear just how well spoken they are.

“I’ve been speaking English since I was four and I still speak with an accent,” she says. “I am so pleased they speak so well.”

Marcelo, now 17, travels across Cambridge by bus (sometimes on the guided bus) to study for his A-levels at Impington Village College. And he’s hoping to go to the Netherlands to study economics. While his younger brother Patricio, 15, cycles to his old school at Parkside in the centre of Cambridge, where he’s studying for his GCSEs. Monica is very focused on making sure that her boys are doing as well as they possibly can in the English state education system. Through her own experience studying for a degree at the University of Cambridge, she’s seen the opportunities that are available. And she’s hungry to keep on studying and learning herself.

For the time-being, Monica is happy to be teaching Spanish while she decides whether to study for a Master’s degree or a PGCE to become a teacher of Spanish. But when the boys leave home in a few year’s time, she has no intention of staying in Great Kneighton – or even in Cambridge. She plans to head straight for the bright lights of the big city.

“We’re going to live in Covent Garden,” she says with a twinkle in her eye. “You know, a busy place with people out all the time.”

“ Maybe what I like is developments designed around people walking, like in old times. These areas have been designed to use more cars.”

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Name Tom Warburton Age 18 Lives in Paget Road Moved to Trumpington in 2003 Type of housing Three-bedroom terraced council house, built in 1946 Current value Around £250,000 (according to Zoopla) Favourite place in Trumpington Community Orchard

“ … Everyone around here is old.”

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Tom Warburton

e m a n k c i N ’ s d n e My Fri s i n o t g n i p m u r T r fo ‘Trampington’ When 18-year-old Tom Warburton moved to Trumpington around a decade ago with his Mum and two older brothers, he didn’t think too much of his new home on the estate – a three-bed 1940s-built council house on Paget Road.

“They used to take the piss out of me quite a lot,” he says, brushing his Kooks-inspired floppy fringe from his eyes under his trademark koala bear hat (which he wears all year round, even through the hottest summer months).

“It was nowhere near as nice as our old house (in Cherry Hinton),” he says. “The neighbours are better, within reason. But I think where we lived before was kind of a squared off area, so everyone knew everyone.

And when something went wrong, someone knew someone who could have done something about it.

Here we’ve got our little sort of square where we live and it feels like it’s more secluded from the rest of the estate. No one really comes onto this little bit.”

“They didn’t like me because I was some weird kid,” he says. “And I can be a bit of a cocky bastard... Then I became 6’ 4” and the shit stopped. Now they don’t pick on me.

They seem to be alright with me. I get the general nod.

That’s about it.”

The three Warburton brothers were lucky, he says, because they already knew their next door neighbour’s oldest son. And they weren’t complete strangers to Trumpington when they moved across town either.

Their Nan lived round the corner from their new house on Byron Square. And their Mum, who works for the council, had lived on the estate for most of her life. She went to the local primary school – Fawcett – and the three brothers went there too, travelling across from Cherry Hinton for the first few years.

Even though the Warburtons (no relation to the bread­ makers that gather wheat from the nearby Pemberton farm!) already knew some of the families on the estate, Tom remembers it wasn’t that easy to impress some of their new neighbours when they first moved to Paget Road.

In his old neighbourhood in Cherry Hinton, Tom was sometimes woken in the night to the sound of all-night parties, neighbours shouting and police sirens. “I can still remember quite clearly the police coming to our door and asking if we’d seen anything,” he says.

That doesn’t happen on Paget Road, at least not at his house, he says. You’re more likely to hear the sound of ambulances in the middle of the night, he adds, “but that’s because everyone around here is old”.

“There are a few families that give [the estate] a bad name,” he says. “But a few of them have gone to prison so it’s a lot better now.”

A decade after moving to Trumpington, Tom has finished at Fawcett. He’s been through secondary school (Sawston Village College) and he’s finished a year of college (he studied software development, coding and gaming at Cambridge Regional College). When we first met him,

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“ There’s not

e r e h w y n a ly l a e r

we can go…” he was working at the local chip shop along Anstey Way to earn some money while he waited to find out if he could back go to study at Long Road Sixth Form College.

He wanted to study animation.

“This job’s alright for now,” he told us. “But I do want something long term. I do want to go back to college.”

“I earn £6 an hour at the chippy,” he says. “I work a minimum of six hours a week. Sometimes they can’t tell me when they need me. It puts you on a bit of a downer. I earn nearly £40 a week and half of that goes to my Mum. If I was living on my own, I’d be dead.”

Moving on up…

When we revisit Tom nine months later, he’s got a job in a pub in Sawston. His plans to go back to college are on hold for now. “I decided that working was the best way to save up to pay some rent,” he says. Eventually, he’s hoping to find somewhere to live on the south side of Cambridge, maybe with his girlfriend, who lives a few miles down the road in Sawston.

So we put a basketball hoop on it. And there are also these huge trees in the back garden that block out our light.”

When we first met Tom at the age of 17, he was already considering his best escape route out of the estate. He could have followed his oldest brother Chris to Norwich, who was working at Burger King for two years and now works in an office job. “But I don’t want to move there to have the same situation as here – stuck in a dead-end job,” he told us.

Tom’s middle brother Ash trained as a plumber, but there’s not much work to be had for him at the moment either, apparently. Most of Tom’s friends work in part-time jobs.

But it’s not that easy to find a job that pays well.

It’s fair to say that Tom is not that sad at the prospect of leaving his childhood home in Trumpington behind.

“To be honest, I don’t know anyone my age that doesn’t work in a shop,” he says. “They don’t seem to take anyone from Waitrose from the estate – unless they’ve gone to Hills Road (the best college you can go to around here).

The amount of people I know who live on Bishops Road, they apply once and they get a job. But friends from here who’ve been to Long Road College and Cambridge Regional College and live on the estate, often they don’t even get a reply.”

“I do enjoy living here,” he says. “But our house wasn’t really in the best shape when we moved here. Considering it’s a council house, we didn’t want to spend thousands of pounds on extensions and things. Our neighbours built this huge extension,” he adds, “which blocks out our sun.

Tom isn’t necessarily proud of the estate that’s been his home for all these years. He’s fairly indifferent to the fact that Trumpington is now in a sought-after part of town, in estate agents’ eyes, where houses are regularly selling for upward of £250,000.

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And it’s a neighbourhood that was once considered posh by post-war refugees from London like 81-year-old Joan Haylock – who has lived on the estate since cows grazed on the recreation field where Tom now hangs out with his mates. To him, it’s just a bit boring.

“We’ve got so much stuff compared to so many other estates, yet I still manage to find myself being bored,” he acknowledges. “I think they do a lot more to the estate because it’s crap. The nickname for it among my friends is ‘Trampington’. They don’t really come on the estate. Trumpington has always been that one place, other than Arbury, which is like – ah – grim… The initial assumption is that it’s pretty crap.”

But it’s not quite as rubbish as people might think, says Tom. Although he did used to prefer it in the olden days, when he was growing up.

“The old park was great,” he says. “There’s a hill in the middle of the green that used to be part of the park – there used to be a slide that started from up there and a roundabout on top. It was really cool. Then they made the new park and they shut it all off and it wasn’t as good.”

“But then again,” he says. “They laid down the new football pitch. I remember it being amazing. It was the year of the World Cup and everyone was out there.”

Tom hardly ever plays football these days: “I start to look like a child molester!” he deadpans. “It’s not right to play football with ten year olds.”

“There are football teams playing there on the green every Sunday,” he says. “But they aren’t even a Trumpington team. They’re from Duxford…”

What Tom does appreciate about the new park is the skateboard ramp, because skateboarding is one of his biggest passions – alongside playing his guitar.

“I’ve been skateboarding for four or five years,” he says.

“In winter, it’s not so good because the ramp is always wet or icy or slippery. So you can’t do much on there.

I go around town sometimes but you mostly get told to get off your board or it’s private property, even though there are no signs.”

“Our next door neighbour, her Mum worked for the council, she always said she could get us an extra ramp so we could do different tricks – but they never really got around to it. Now that the Pavilion has been built on the green, we go there to skateboard sometimes. But we get kicked off there too. So there’s not really anywhere we can go. Our skateboards must make too much noise or something.”

“The Pavilion is quite nice,” he says of the sports pavilion that was renovated and reopened in 2009 as a community space that hosts a youth club and other community events, including the over-60s bingo. “I don’t ever use it in the summer. But in the winter, obviously it’s indoors. You tend to sit in there with your mates. It’s something to do.”

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“ We’ve got so much stuff compared to so many other estates, yet I still manage to find myself being bored…”

Too good to be Trumpington?

Tom is also largely indifferent to the houses that are being built on the new Great Kneighton development on the fields behind the estate – some costing upwards of £2 million. He has no chance, he says, of affording to live there.

He has been to visit friends on the Trumpington Meadows development – which is being built on the other side of Trumpington behind Waitrose. His initial reaction was that the new estate didn’t look like his image of Trumpington at all. It was like going on holiday and waking up somewhere different.

“It’s all new,” he says. “And it looks too good to be Trumpington.”

He hasn’t been to see any of the houses on the new Great Kneighton development yet, although he and his mates did used to go and explore the guided busway and the building site before any of it was opened up.

“People had already been there because the fences were down,” he says. “So we said ‘we’re not vandalising anything, so we might as well use it’. The only problem was that going down the Addenbrooke’s bridge when it was being built, there were gaps about a foot long... That was quite fun, when you were skateboarding at high speed.”

Today, he uses the guided busway as a super convenient cycle route into Cambridge. “It’s the only way I get to town,” he says. For him, that’s far and away the best thing about the new development.

Somewhere to hang out So what would entice him, if anything, to visit this new part of Trumpington that’s springing up on his doorstep?

“Something similar to the skate park in Saffron Walden,” he says. “An area where you can actually go – and it’s a nice place to hang out... The amount of people I know round here who, if they had the space, would BMX, skateboard, inline skate, scoot. It would be packed.

It just gets people out and gives them something to do.”

He doubts whether the new community square that’s being built on the no man’s land between the estate and the guided busway will be a place where he’ll want to spend too much time. For him, it belongs to the new development – not to the Trumpington where he’s grown up.

“I think it’s too out of the way,” he says. “It’s not really our square, it’s theirs. The estates aren’t really connected.

It’s a territorial thing.”

For the time-being, Tom’s favourite place to hang out in Trumpington is the community orchard, which Foster Road resident Ceri Galloway helped to set up on a disused patch of fly-tipped land next to the allotments. He likes

habitorials Issue 0 – Tom Warburton { Page 46 }

to go and sit there with his girlfriend. And with his mates, when they’re not complaining too much about the cold…

“It’s a grassy area in the middle of a concrete jungle,” he says. “It’s out of the way. It’s not completely in the middle of the busy-ness of the estate. It’s really peaceful.”

Tom also likes to go and sit by the new lake that’s been created by the developers on the 120-acre country park.

It’s not strictly open to the public yet. In spite of the “No Public Access signs” (some of which have been graffitied over), nobody stops you from walking there now. Tom remembers playing on these same fields when he was a boy.

“I looked at a picture recently of these ‘backs’,” he says.

“You just had rows and rows of fields and trees.”

It annoys him that he can’t get across the former Clay Farm fields to the Nine Wells nature reserve any more, but he doesn’t really mind the fact that the fields where he used to play are disappearing to make way for 2,300 new houses.

“It’s progress,” he says. “But for people who are younger, or who have lived here a long time, it’s a bit of a chip on their shoulder.”

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Vicky Anning

In Search of Common Ground A Writer’s Afterthought

There is a signpost standing sentinel in a thistle patch at the bottom of the bridge that carries the guided busway from Addenbrooke’s Hospital left towards Trumpington and right to the station and beyond. This signpost looks strangely incongruous, on a strip of no man’s land that used to be arable farming land until just a few years ago. Now that same untended patch of soil loosely demarcates the edge of the new 120-acre country park. Standing here at this newly-created crossroads, with arrows pointing in all directions, it’s like holding up a mirror to Trumpington’s confused psyche.

In one direction, beyond the newly-planted trees and manmade lakes of the country park, the new “contemporary” houses of the Great Kneighton development are being filled as quickly as they are put up. To the right, the chimneys of the post-war Trumpington council estate, planned for “the working classes” after World War II, are just about visible.

In the foreground, the diggers and dumper trucks are busily preparing the ground for the new community square – to be known as “Hobson’s Square” – which will include a five-storey building with a community centre at the bottom of it. A solitary worker in his high vis jacket and Caterpillar boots guards the gates to protect pedestrians and cyclists from construction traffic. To the left rises the monolith that is Addenbrooke’s Hospital, which one of our interviewees likened to ‘Mordor’ – the fictional land in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings that’s surrounded by looming mountains. And through the middle of it all thunders the newly-built guided busway at speeds of up to 55mph, ferrying people 1.5 miles to the station and on through Cambridge to St Ives and Huntingdon in one direction and to Trumpington Park & Ride in the other.

We are not the first people to stand at this wind-blown spot. Excavations of the Great Kneighton site before the building work began uncovered prehistoric activity dating back more than 5,000 years. Archaeologists unearthed a Middle Bronze Age landscape of field systems, enclosures and settlements covering large areas of the site that dated back to 1,500 BC. By the time the Domesday Book was written in 1086 AD, the village of Trumpington boasted 37 households, four manors and a mill. By the early 1900s, the population had swelled to around 1,300. Back then, the village still boasted a vibrant agricultural community – with three working farms and a blacksmith. Even in the lifetime of some of our older interviewees, life in the village was lived at a much slower pace. Cows used to cross Trumpington High Street four times a day to be milked. Sheep grazed on the field outside Bidwells. Today, the road that cuts through the centre of Trumpington is a main artery carrying traffic from Cambridge out to the M11 and beyond.

When I first moved to Trumpington almost ten years ago, there were around 7,000 people living here. But it still felt like an outpost on the very edge of Cambridge, surrounded by farm land. It was a place that people drove through on the way to somewhere else. A place with a village hall and a residents’ association, a war memorial and a few stray thatched cottages dotted along the frequently grid-locked main road. A place with no obvious village heart or soul. A place where you felt you could almost drop off the edge of the map and nobody would notice!

Ten years later, things are changing so quickly it’s hard to keep up. I can see pitched roofs and cranes from my daughter’s bedroom window where once there were just fields. The sound of skylarks has been replaced for now with the constant beeping of reversing trucks.

The first phase of the building work is almost complete –

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GUIDED BUSWAY Planned by Cambridgeshire County Council to help ease traffic congestion along the A14, the concept of the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway was first presented to local residents in 2003.

It was quickly dubbed by locals as the “misguided busway”.

The longest dedicated concrete guideway in the world, it was designed to provide rapid, comfortable and affordable transport between Huntingdon and Cambridge – running along the old railway track from St Ives to north Cambridge, then from the railway station to Trumpington Park & Ride, using the old disused Cambridge to Bedford rail line.

The disused cutting where the line ran alongside the Trumpington allotments had been left to grow wild and was designated a County Wildlife Site.

In spite of many objections and a budget overrun of more than £31 million, the £181 million busway opened up in 2011. Apparently, it carried more than 3.5 million passengers in the last year alone.

Alongside the busway is a path that is wellused as a cycle route to the station, although there have been safety concerns raised by local residents, particularly after a cyclist was hit by a bus earlier this year.

bringing hundreds of new homes and thousands of new residents to this once sleepy village on the southern tip of Cambridge.

And now, as the new residents move in, a new phase begins. A period of adjustment when we all get used to living side by side – residents who have lived here for generations like the Pemberton family, the Haylocks and the Warburtons; people who have just moved in from far-flung places like Mexico and South Africa and Iceland.

And others still who have moved here inbetween times, drawn to the area by work or studies, or the proximity to the M11, as I was. We jostle together uncertainly in the recently expanded aisles of Waitrose. We swerve around each other as we cycle along the well-used path alongside the new guided busway. We nod to each other as we bypass the “No Public Access” signs to walk our dogs or jog along the criss-crossing paths of the soon-to-be-opened country park.

We are told in the marketing brochures of Countryside Properties that “Great Kneighton is an exciting new community which is taking place in one of the most soughtafter areas in Cambridge”. And the hype seems to be working. You can see the posters at the station and even as you leave Stansted airport. The houses on the new development are selling for up to £2 million a piece – and prices have risen there by as much as 25% over the last

habitorials Issue 0 – In Search of Common Ground { Page 56 }

year alone. There’s been a housing boom in the rest of Trumpington too, pushing prices up in some of the streets that are not used to being described as “sought-after” at all. In fact, until quite recently, Trumpington’s estate – with its mixture of council housing and private homes – was regarded as a bit rough. A bit “Trampington”, according to some of our interviewee’s friends! Yet before our very eyes, Trumpington is becoming a property hot spot that has estate agents fighting to sell even the most modest homes.

days and street parties? Will there be market stalls and independent retailers, as Georgie and David would like to see? And is that compatible with the need for affordable shopping options that other residents are hoping for?

Will we as residents have a say in the make up of the square? Or is a community square that is predominantly a commercial space actually an oxymoron?

As I cycle through Trumpington, along the narrow pathway past the allotments and the community orchard and the chicken coops on the way to my daughter’s school each day, I find myself musing about what exactly this “exciting new community” might look like? What would it take to entice people like me and my ten-year-old daughter, teenagers like Tom Warburton who have grown up on Trumpington estate, or newcomers like Georgie Morrill and David Willsher to use the much-vaunted new amenities that fill the pages of the Great Kneighton’s marketing literature. The new 120-acre country park? The new sports pitches and children’s play areas? The new community square? Is it a case of “build it and they will come”? Or is there a more complicated dynamic at play here?

Certainly, some of the existing Trumpington residents are sceptical about the new public spaces being created around them. Their own experiences have shown that the most sustainable common spaces are those that are organically grown and community led, like the allotments or the Pavilion or the community orchard, which are all run by local residents. They observe with a wry nod of recognition that the guided busway is used as a super fast bicycle route into town, rather than as a bus route.

And they admit that some residents are already ignoring the “No Public Access” signs to explore the paths of the soon-to-be-opened country park. Short cuts have always been part of the landscape, even during the time when most of these fields were privately-owned Pemberton family farming land. And we will probably always find our own ways of navigating the space around us.

Will the community square become the place where we all come together as they want us to believe? Will it become a place for meeting and socialising, for concerts, community

Although the wheels of the community consultation process have been turning quietly in the background, I don’t feel it has been public enough. If you had consulted

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E C N E ID S E R IN S T N E ID RES Live it. Love it. Buy it.

Buying a home is such a big step! How will you know if you’ve found the right neighbourhood for you and your loved ones? Is this place the right place?

The Residents in Residence scheme gives potential residents the opportunity to spend some time living in a home and in a community before buying.

This innovative scheme enables you as a future home owner to step through the front door and stay for a while. Rather than just imagine what your life in one of these contemporary urban developments might be like, you can experience your new lifestyle first hand.

Try out your local post office, practise your daily commute, speak to your neighbour in the driveway, and see what leisure activities your local area offers.

Talk to us and together we will find you the home of your dreams.

Through Residents in Residence you can live it. You can love it. You can buy it.

And remember, after you have been a Resident in Residence, you are under no obligation to stay.

If you want to know more about this scheme and follow Elyssa’s story, go to: www.habitorials.org.uk/residentsinresidence

t n a g r e iv L a s s ly E : Y D U CASE ST After leaving her native Canada, Elyssa Livergant has lived in London for more than a decade. She has been saving up for a deposit, but the thirty something hasn’t been able to decide where to buy a more permanent home. It’s a big decision to make, especially for a first time buyer.

“For many years I have been umming and aahing about whether I should move,” explains performance artist Elyssa. “Everything is so expensive in London and I am not necessarily tied down by my work in the City. I have been looking at lots of houses in different places, but it is just such a big step and I could never quite make myself put an offer in.”

Over the last few years, Elyssa has been regularly invited to teach workshops at Anglia Ruskin University and she often wondered if Cambridge might be the place for her. Elyssa often has to travel abroad for her work, so the proximity to the M11 and to Stansted Airport would suit her perfectly.

When she first read about the Residents in Residence scheme, she was immediately intrigued by the idea.

“A friend showed me the ad and I immediately thought: ‘This is for me! I have to try this.’ So I went through the application process and it was surprisingly uncomplicated,” says Elyssa. “I haven’t given up my flat in London yet, of course. That would be too scary.”

“It is really remarkable how fast this area is changing,” Elyssa ponders, looking out of the floor-to-ceiling window over the ever-expanding development of Great Kneighton, “Even just in the last three months since my application was submitted. On the one hand I am so excited to be part of something new and on the other hand I am aware that these changes bring unrest for other people as well.”

Elyssa is a very keen gardener. She is not quite sure whether there is enough space in the actual garden to grow her plants, but she is very excited about the proposed community gardens.

“I am so excited to try out this house and neighbourhood,” she says. “I have been walking into Trumpington and on my way I saw some fantastic allotments and chicken plots.

I can’t wait to find out more and hopefully get involved.

And of course with the community gardens, if they are ready soon.”

She also likes cycling and hopes to still be on the Residents in Residence scheme in the summer, so she can explore the various cycle routes around Great Kneighton and Trum­ pington. She is also thinking about borrowing a friend’s dog from time to time so she can practise keeping a pet.

When asked how she is planning to get to know her neighbours, she gets very excited. “I love hosting! I am looking forward to getting to know people in the area.

I plan to have lots of neighbours over during my stay.”

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Great KneiGhton habitorials Issue 0