CAM 71 Lent 2014

Cambridge Alumni Magazine Issue 71 Lent 2014

In this issue:

Reading light The waters are rising Playfulness Concrete feedback Me2

CAM/71

Contents

Peter Funch

CAM Cambridge Alumni Magazine Issue 71 Lent Term 2014

24 Marcus Ginns

28

Regulars

Extracurricular

Letters 02 Don’s diary 03 Update 04 Diary 08 My room, your room 10 The best ...

11 Secret Cambridge 12 Debate 18

University matters My Cambridge Reading list Cambridge soundtrack A sporting life Prize crossword

41 42 44 45 47 48

Features The waters are rising

14

Where will we all go when the seas rise?

How will the everyday, the ordinary change?

Lucy Jolin dips a toe into the water.

Concrete feedback

William Pryce

47 CAM is published three times a year, in the Lent, Easter and Michaelmas terms and is sent free to Cambridge alumni.

It is available to non-alumni on subscription. For further information contact the Alumni Relations Office.

The opinions expressed in CAM are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of the University of Cambridge.

This publication contains paper manufactured by Chain-of-Custody certified suppliers operating within internationally recognised environmental standards in order to ensure sustainable sourcing and production.

Editor Mira Katbamna yellowbutton.co.uk Managing Editor Morven Knowles Design and art direction Paul Oldman smithltd.co.uk Print Pindar Publisher The University of Cambridge Development and Alumni Relations 1 Quayside Bridge Street Cambridge CB5 8AB Tel +44 (0)1223 332288 Editorial enquiries Tel +44 (0)1223 760149 cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk

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Alumni enquiries Tel +44 (0)1223 760149 contact@alumni.cam.ac.uk alumni.cam.ac.uk facebook.com/ cambridgealumni @camalumni #cammag

Cover photograph: Posidonia blue bowl by Forlane 6 Studio Copyright © 2014 The University of Cambridge.

Dr Mohammed Elshafie wants to give London not just a brain, but an entire nervous system.

Me2

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Kathleen Richardson argues that digital technology is shifting the focus away from our physical lives towards a virtual existence.

Reading light

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Ensuring bookworms have sufficient light to read by has obsessed the creators of libraries since the 16th century says Dr James Campbell.

Advertising enquiries Tel +44 (0)20 7520 9474 landmark@lps.co.uk Services offered by advertisers are not specifically endorsed by the editor or the University of Cambridge. The publisher reserves the right to decline or withdraw advertisements.

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Award Winner 2013

Men at play

34

Work doesn’t have to be serious, argues Professor Patrick Bateson – in fact, excellence often requires many of the qualities of play.

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Your letters

Light reading Welcome to the Lent edition of CAM. The days may be getting longer, but at this time of year most of us are still reading with the (electric) lights on. As Dr James Campbell explores on page 28, ensuring bookworms have sufficient light to read by has obsessed the creators of libraries since the 16th century – though whether we should pity or envy the medieval scholar, forced to down tools as soon as the light faded, remains an open question.

For many readers, the need for light to read by will have, in past months, come a poor second to simply keeping dry. On page 14, CAM ponders the implications of a significantly wetter world, and on page 20 Dr Mohammed Elshafie explains how smart infrastructure might one day help protect our cities from climate change and other challenges.

Elsewhere, Dr Kathleen Richardson argues that digital technology is blurring the line between physical and virtual existence, and on page 34 Professor Patrick Bateson writes that playfulness, far from being the enemy of work, may in fact power our ability to innovate.

Finally, we look forward to reading your letters and emails. Deciding which to print in CAM is always an agonising process; happily we publish a larger selection of letters online, which you can read at alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam.

Mira Katbamna (Caius 1995)

Pots

Lest we forget The interesting article on war memorials (CAM 70) suggested that there is now an unbridgeable distance from the men killed in the Great War. Surely the collective alter egos of those memorialised were those who returned to live out their lives. I remember a decorated schoolmaster and a university lecturer – both of whose very lucid lectures progressed into a struggle with a severe pain barrier. I also recall a breathless man in a darkened hospital ward who relived, in a vocal nightmare, a 45-year-old gas attack. The article mentioned women’s empowerment but said nothing about the obverse side of the losses – the large cohort of women who were forced to remain involuntarily unmarried.

I suggest that the memorials should be seen in a representative way as acknowledging not only the battlefield dead, but also the whole generation who sacrificed much in many different ways in both world wars.

Derek J Winter (Trinity 1957)

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I loved the cover of your Michaelmas 2013 issue. But my eye was drawn to the group of distinguished pots on the table in the centre of the picture.

Turning the pages with anticipation at discovering the name of the potter and more, what did I find... nothing. Alas, dear Editor, you have inadvertently revealed that the culture of Cambridge is still not very visual, as Sir Alan Bowness said was the case in the fifties when yours truly was an undergraduate. A fine piece of ceramics can be a worthier object of attention than many a painting.

Anthony Chamier (Trinity Hall 1956) Editor: You are quite right: the pots are by one of Edmund de Waal’s apprentices, Hortense Suleyman.

Exam nightmares Professor Tong writes that “many graduates have pretty vivid nightmares about exam term”. More than 50 years have passed since I sat Maths Tripos Part II, and I continue to dream of the experience. In my dream, I have never done any work and have not attended any of the lectures. For 50 years, I have let down my college, my tutors, my university, my parents, my school and, most of all, myself.

Recently, a contemporary found the full set of his exam papers in his attic. I am (now) hopeful that my memory has now been purged of its bitter lees, and that I can go on to enjoy the rest of

We are always delighted to receive your emails and letters.

Email your letters to: cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk

Don’s diary

Write to us at: CAM, 1 Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge, CB5 8AB. Please mark your letter ‘for publication’.

You can read more CAM letters at alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam.

Letters may be edited for length.

my life (I am 75) without having to sit and fail those damn Finals ever again.

Adrian Williams (Peterhouse 1957)

An Oxonian writes As an alumnus of Pembroke, Oxford, I was interested to see the reference to Pembroke’s art initiative. I offered to the Pembroke art committee an extraordinary painting of the King’s windows by talented Cambridge artist Isobel Stemp, so a fine reflection of Cambridge now graces Pembroke’s collection.

Miles Dodd (Pembroke, Oxford 1958)

Even stranger blue I read with great interest your coverage of Strange Blue, the University’s Ultimate frisbee team (CAM 69, and Letters CAM 70).

I was one of the original founders of the team back in 1990, and I can shed some light on the question raised in the article about where the name Strange Blue came from. When we started the team we tried out several names, none of which really clicked. Then one day we were driving back from a friendly in Colchester and Cream’s Strange Brew came on the radio.

I said: “Hey, why don’t we call ourselves Strange Blue?” It seemed to tie in the Cambridge sporting tradition with the somewhat alternative (at least back then) nature of the sport of Ultimate.

The name stuck and – as your article 23 years later demonstrates – the rest is history.

Alexander “Sandy” Crockett (Queens’ 1992)

Dr Rosanna Omitowoju is a Senior Language Teaching Officer in the Classics Faculty and a Fellow of King’s.

It’s been a hectic term, as always. I run all the language programmes – and teach them too – which makes my role particularly student-facing.

While a good chunk of our undergraduate students arrive with both Latin and Greek, the majority have only Latin and do an intensive Greek course. We also have a four-year degree programme for students who have neither Greek nor Latin, and then there are postgrads with language needs.

With so many students, I sometimes teach seven or eight hours straight, alternating between Latin and Greek (I rarely have any difficulty switching, except, just very occasionally when my brain gets stuck in one and I have to ‘crunch gears’ to move into the other). Even though I have been running them for a long time, supervisions and small teaching groups remain very fulfilling. And while teaching finalists can be challenging, it is often the students with the least experience in Classics who ask the most far-reaching questions. Undrilled in expectations about what the subject is and what questions they can ask, students sometimes pose the most apparently simple but surprisingly tricky openended questions such as “Why do languages have grammatical gender?”, or “Where does the intellectual framework for thinking about the grammatical structure of Latin come from?”

I recently wrote a reader on Ovid’s Metamorphoses for use by our four-year degree students, which they read after just one term’s exposure to learning Latin: quite hardcore, but really fun.

The students in many ways epitomise what I think of as the ‘new Classics reader’. They are not the well-drilled schoolboys of yesteryear; they learn the languages rapidly and from a base of very little formal grammar in school, and so need constant consolidation of linguistic features and grammar. On the other hand, as readers who want to get to grips with a text for its complex merits both as literature and as a window into the social and cultural history of Rome, they are very sophisticated – making Ovid a perfect choice.

Ovid was an exceptionally playful writer, constantly tripping up his readers and challenging their expectations. I wanted the students to get his jokes. Mind you, my comments suggesting that Ovid wanted us to see the story of Pyramus and Thisbe (doomed teenage love, one of the tragic models for Romeo and Juliet) as a joke, that he was laughing at the farcical ineffectuality of first forays into love and sexuality, sparked some interesting debate. Some students weren’t sure they were comfortable with comedy sitting so close to tragedy – not to mention having earnest young people as its butt!

Away from teaching, my term has plenty of meetings shoehorned in, mostly in the day, but some in the evenings, too. At the moment I am on the Faculty Board and College Council, as well as some smaller committees. I am not a big speaker in meetings, but I try to listen and think hard about the issues and contribute when I feel no one else is saying what I think needs to be said.

Michaelmas Term finished for me, as for so very many of us, with the admissions round and lots of interviewing. As well as doing my usual Classics interviews, things were a bit different this year. From Lent 2014, I will take over as Admissions Tutor for King’s, so I shadowed my predecessor and also sat in on some interviews in different subjects, which was fascinating.

Yet again I was struck by the enormous and exceptionally careful effort that goes in to trying to make the experience fair, open – and even, at times, inspiring – for the candidates, so that we make the best decisions we possibly can.

After that, a quick bit of research, editing an article on which I had received comments during the term, followed by an absolute whirlwind of last-minute Christmas shopping getting things ready for a fairly traditional family Christmas with my husband and four children.

There’s never a dull moment!

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UPDATE LENT TERM Nick David

engineering

RAE set to appoint first female president The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) has nominated Professor Dame Ann Dowling to be its next president. If appointed, she will be the first woman to head up the RAE. Dowling, who is head of the Engineering Department, was included on The Power List 2013, a table of the 100 most powerful women in the UK compiled by BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.

With a background in mathematics and mechanical engineering, she is an expert in combustion and acoustics and leads research on efficient, low emission combustion for aero and industrial gas turbines and low-noise vehicles, particularly aircraft and cars.

Dowling said she was “honoured to be nominated… at a crucial time when it is generally acknowledged that many more engineers will be required to help the country benefit from the knowledge economy of the future”. She will now go through the formal election process and, as the only nominated candidate, will likely take up the post in September for a five-year term.

A 160-year rivalry The 160th Boat Race will take place on 6 April this year, with the Light Blues looking to extend their slim overall lead in the series and avenge last year’s narrow defeat. Cambridge have won 81 races to Oxford’s 77 (with one dead heat in 1877), and will once again be coached

by Steve Trapmore, the Olympic gold medallist.

The women’s event will take place at Henley-onThames a week earlier in what will be the last contest of its kind on the course – from 2015 the women’s event will move to the Tideway, alongside the men.

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NORTH WEST CAMBRIDGE

University to open primary school Cambridge will break new ground next year when it opens its own primary school for up to 630 pupils as part of the North West Cambridge Development.

The University of Cambridge Training School will educate local pupils while also training new teachers and acting as a centre for research into learning. Its focus will be on student learning, teacher learning and the relationship between the two.

Professor Peter Gronn, Head of the Faculty of Education, said that the new school, which will open in time for the academic year 2015-16, will enable the University to “play a lead national role

in the enhancement of teacher quality, student learning and strategies for school improvement”.

New Heads of House appointed St Edmund’s College has elected the Hon Matthew Bullock as Master. He will take up office in October, and succeeds Professor Paul Luzio. Lord Grabiner QC is to become the 45th Master of Clare College. He will succeed Professor Tony Badger. Trinity Hall has elected Reverend Dr Jeremy Morris as 44th Master.

He succeeds Professor Martin Daunton.

Corbis

COLLEGES

Murray Edwards celebrates 60 years

National Portrait Gallery/© Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of Murray Edwards College. Established in 1954 as New Hall, following a movement to offer academic equality to women in Cambridge after the second world war, the College’s first home was in Silver Street, where Darwin College stands today. Murray Edwards moved to its current building, with its iconic dome, on Huntingdon Road in 1965.

The College has planned a series of events, Women Today, Women Tomorrow, to reflect its achievements in supporting women throughout, and beyond, their time at Cambridge.

As well as celebrating the lives of Murray Edwards’ alumnae, the series will consider the challenges women

UPDATE LENT TERM

New Year Honours Four Cambridge luminaries were recognised in the Queen’s New Year’s honours list: economic geographer Professor Ash Amin has been awarded a CBE; Emeritus Professor of Bone Medicine Juliet Compston has been awarded an OBE; Professor of Surgical Oncology David Neal has been awarded a CBE; and Baroness Onora O’Neill of Bengarve, Professor Emeritus and former Principal of Newnham College, has become a Companion of Honour.

continue to face and how they strive to overcome them.

Celebrations kick-off on 6 March at the Oxford and Cambridge Club in London and continue with an Alumnae Weekend from 26-28 September.

Key public events at the weekend will include a symposium on Women in Science and a panel discussion chaired

by Mishal Husain (Murray Edwards, New Hall 1992), featuring women who have achieved against the odds.

For more information please email alumnae@murrayedwards.cam.ac.uk.

At the first dinner in New Hall, in 1954, 14 of a total of 16 undergraduates, among them founder Dame Rosemary Murray, sit down to eat.

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RESEARCH

Breakthrough for superconductor spintronics Scientists at Cambridge have announced a breakthrough in the field of spin-based electronics – ‘spintronics’ – that could form the basis of a future revolution in computing.

The work uses, for the first time, more energyefficient superconductors both to deliver a charge for the spin-based devices that appear in modern microelectronic circuits, and to perform logic operations. The result promises the potential to create a new generation of super-fast computers capable of processing vast amounts of data in an energy-efficient way.

According to research leader Dr Jason Robinson (below), University Royal Society Research Fellow in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, the results offer “a glimpse into a future in which supercomputing could be far more energy efficient”.

New Pro-Vice-Chancellor Professor Graham Virgo has been appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education, effective from October 2014. Professor Virgo, who received a Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching in 2002, is currently Professor of English Private Law in the Faculty of Law, and has been a Fellow of Downing since 1989.

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UPDATE LENT TERM

Did you know... ...you can go online to get access to a range of services and benefits?

On our website, alumni.cam.ac.uk, you can read all the latest news and views from the University and through the ‘About your degree’ pages you can request degree certificates, get copies of transcripts and find out how to arrange your Cambridge MA. As a graduate you still have access to the University Library and you can find out more at lib.cam.ac.uk/admissions.

Finally, make sure you get your free email for life at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/ benefits/email-for-life.

E: contact@alumni.cam.ac.uk T : +44 (0)1223 332288 W: alumni.cam.ac.uk

More discounts on offer CAMCard holders can now take advantage of even more great benefits, as three more Cambridge businesses have signed up to offer discounts.

The Cambridge Cheese Company, Cambridge Bike Tours and the newly refurbished The Tickell Arms in Whittlesford all now offer discounts to cardholders.

The CAMCard is issued free to all alumni and gives holders access to a range of discounts and other benefits. Visit the website to get or replace your CAMCard or to find out more about CAMCard partners. alumni.cam.ac.uk/benefits/camcard

TRAVEL PROGRAMME

Get off the beaten track

T

he current edition of Unbound, the Cambridge Alumni Travel Programme brochure, features excursions you may not find in a conventional travel brochure, with trips as far afield as Antarctica, Japan, Burma and Ethiopia.

Unusual journeys include trekking in the ancient kingdom of Mustang in the Himalayas, and the programme’s most luxurious trip yet, a 15-day journey by private train from the southern Caucasus across the Caspian Sea to the ancient trading posts of the Silk Road.

The tours offer a unique opportunity for you to travel with like-minded alumni and with a donation made to the University for every booking, they are also a great way to support Cambridge.

Over the 22 years the programme has been running, donations have totalled more than £1m.

alumni.cam.ac.uk/travel

DIARY LENT TERM Free thinking about history, technology, literature and science forms the core of The Cambridge Series at the Hay Festival which runs 22 May - 1 June in the perfect setting of the Brecon Beacons National Park.

Among the University’s speakers will be Stephen Fry, Dr Terri Apter, Dr Ha-Joon Chang, Professor Richard Evans, Professor Robert Mair, Professor Henrietta Moore, Professor John Gurdon, Dr Noreena Hertz and Dame Barbara Stocking, appearing alongside international guests Toni Morrison, Hugh Masekela and Judi Dench.

The full festival programme can be found at hayfestival. org.

On Sunday 25 May there will be an exclusive alumni dinner with guest of honour Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England, at Richard Booth’s Bookshop. During the afternoon there will also be a Cambridge tea party in the Summerhouse on the Festival site. Please see alumni.cam.ac.uk/hay for more details.

Join fellow alumni for exclusive events at the Hay Festival Hay Festival gathers people together to think about the world as it is, and to imagine how it might be.

It’s a big conversation about discovery and an intellectual adventure.

Bring your friends and your family – there is a programme of events for children and teenagers throughout half term week.

For a chance to win three nights for four in a cottage from Brecon Beacons Holiday Cottages (breconcottages.com) and a Golden Ticket for the festival, please complete the following line of poetry – with Dylan Thomas’ original or your own improvisation – “Now as I was young and easy, under the apple boughs / About the lilting house and ...” and post your entry at hayfestival.org/cam.

Win a Golden Ticket

Lucinda Rogers/Heart

Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts 22 May – 1 June 2014 events@alumni.cam.ac.uk

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DIARY LENT TERM

Alumni events: E: events@alumni.cam.ac.uk T: +44 (0)1223 332288 W: alumni.cam.ac.uk

In brief Other events Discoveries: Art, Science and Exploration from the University of Cambridge Museums

© Museum of Zoology/ The Fitzwilliam Museum/ The Polar Museum (photo by Paul Tucker)/ Museum of Classical Archaeology, University of Cambridge

31 January–27 April 2014, Two Temple Place, London Discoveries is the first major exhibition to bring together the fascinating collections of the eight University of Cambridge museums. Professor Nick Thomas, co-curator of Discoveries and Director of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, describes the exhibition as “fragments of enormous human endeavour and effort” in “a microcosm of the limitless notion of discovery through time”. It’s open for just a few more weeks. fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/discoveries

Perception

New Music Series

Until 20 April 2014, Cambridge Science Centre

Winter/Spring 2014, Kettle’s Yard

An extraordinary sensory experience, this new hands-on exhibition uses illusions to uncover how our brain and senses work, and reveals the tricks our brains use to make sense of the world. cambridgesciencecentre.org

27 April: Peter Sheppard Skærved, violin and Roderick Chadwick, piano 11 May: Trevor Wishart’s electroacoustic works 25 May: The Kreutzer String Quartet (with cellist Bridget MacRae) 15 June: Errollyn Wallen’s songs with piano kettlesyard.co.uk

Cambridge Literary Festival 1– 6 April 2014

A World of Private Mystery: John Craxton, RA (1922–2009) Until 21 April 2014, Mellon Gallery, Fitzwilliam Museum A fresh perspective on John Craxton, one of the great British artists of the 20th century, this exhibition features a selection of more than 60 of his finest pictures. fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk

The much-loved Wordfest transforms itself this year into the Cambridge Literary Festival, a six-day celebration of the power of literature to entertain, inform and provoke. cambridgeliteraryfestival.com

Save the date!

Alumni Festival 26-28 September 2014 alumni.cam.ac.uk CAM 71 9

My room, your room Room F11, ORCHARD COURT, MURRAY EDWARDS Words Lucy Jolin Photograph David Yeo Mishal Husain (Murray Edwards, New Hall 1992) is a presenter for BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme. Before joining the station, she was the main host of Impact, BBC World News’ 90-minute daily programme. She has previously presented the Sunday edition of the News at Ten, and also reported live from around the world.

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Catriona Murray is a second-year Natural Sciences student who loves astrophysics and her Tunnock’s teacake and caramel wafer cushions.

“My mum bought them for me, just before I came here. She said: ‘These will remind you of home.’”

M

ishal Husain and Catriona Murray are discussing breezeblocks. It seems like an odd choice of subject, until you notice the walls.

“Everyone has their own way of covering them up. When I was asked if you could come and look at my room, my first thought was ‘My God, I’ve got so much tat on my walls!’” says Murray, who has decorated the breezeblocks with an eclectic mix of TV-themed posters, flyers and photos. “I wanted it to feel a bit home-from-home, as it’s not easy to get back to Glasgow at weekends.”

“I had a big wall-hanging,” says Husain. “My family are from Pakistan, so I brought some textiles from there. I suspect I’d think them too studenty now, but they were very useful for covering up big chunks of the wall. I remember the cork floor too,” she adds, peering down. “Luckily, I think cork has come back into fashion now…”

Husain says the room itself has hardly changed, but the view has – there’s now a building where there used

I think at one point I was in a Russian play. Without even speaking the language. Cambridge is amazing for things like that

to be an open space. And contents of F11 are decidedly different. “I had a huge stereo and loads of tapes,” she says. “That was in the days before iPods, of course.

But I don’t remember bringing many books. I ended up buying lots of law books for my course, which were very expensive.”

Murray’s bookcase holds many maths and physics textbooks, plus a half-read copy of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science. “I’m enjoying Fahrenheit 451 but I’ve had to stop because I just don’t have time to read for fun,” she explains.

“I brought a book of Russian poetry and I tried to keep my interest in the country going,” says Husain.

“Cambridge is amazing for things like that. I think at one point I was in a Russian play. Without even speaking the language.”

An understandable aversion to stripped-down decor isn’t the only thing the two have in common. Neither felt homesick when they first arrived at Cambridge (Husain came up in 1992, to read law). Having been to boarding school, Husain says living away from home wasn’t a problem. She had also spent a gap year living in Russia and in Pakistan, where she did work experience on a newspaper in Islamabad.

“I remember being hugely excited because I’d wanted to come here since I was 13,” she says. “I knew that this was where I wanted to study and I felt this tremendous excitement that this was really happening.

“And I was far too busy to feel homesick,” says Murray, whose timetable displays a dizzying array of lectures and sports fixtures. “There’s too much going on. I want to fit something into every hour. I want to experience everything.”

“That’s exactly how I remember the natural scientists,” says Husain. “They were the ones with the most demanding work schedules but they were also the ones who were rowing at six in the morning. Mind you, I also tried rowing in my first term. I remember getting up early and cycling down the hill to the boathouses.

“I had virtually forgotten about it; I hadn’t even told my husband about it. Then when I was covering the 2012 Olympics, I was interviewing the Team GB women’s rowing team. Live on air, I said: ‘Oh yes, I used to row when I was at university.’ And my husband was watching at home and he said: ‘You made that up!’ And I said ‘No, I really didn’t! It is true, honest!’

It was a big feature of my first term here.”

Returning to her old room has been a poignant experience, Husain says. “Everything came back as soon as I walked into the room. I remember very well the moment of coming up the stairs for the first time.

You open the door. It shuts behind you – and your time at Cambridge has begun.”

The best... chips in Cambridge Gabrielle Schwarz is reading English Literature at Pembroke Its official name is The Gardenia, but everyone knows it familiarly, familially, as Gardies. Indeed, stepping into Gardies often feels like arriving at the home of a relative hosting a family reunion.

It’s probably the photos that line the walls from floor to ceiling. These snaps taken of customers – usually caught at 3am wearing bright plastic sunglasses or a stupid hat found on the floor of a club – are updated frequently, continually embracing the latest additions to the clan of Gardies’ regulars.

Needless to say, Gardies does great chips: chunky, hearty hunks of potato, poles apart from the lightweight equivalents served nearby. As anyone who cares enough about fried potatoes will know, there are many factors to address when crafting the perfect chip. Gardies succeeds in every respect: shape (substantial but not wedge-like), seasoning (neither overly salty nor bland), and texture (crisp exterior giving way to soft interior).

In contrast, the limp, pallid product served elsewhere leave me feeling queasier than the round of

drinks that made chips seem like a good idea in the first place.

And then there is the context.

Until recently, my only complaint about Gardies was the absence of chicken nuggets on the menu, but Gardies is a great listener.

Now you can accompany your chips with the nuggets or burger that always seem so inexplicably desirable on the way home from a night out. I’d personally go further and recommend stepping outside your native comfort zone: Gardies is unique in providing – upstairs – genuinely good Mediterranean cuisine, food that would make my Turkish grandfather proud. Chips with a side of vine leaves, anyone?

The hummus, in particular, is far superior to anything Sainsbury’s can offer and provides a much better alternative to drowning your chips in acrid own-brand ketchup.

And so, in providing this essential student service, Gardies continues to reign supreme over its competitors, with indoor seating, later opening hours, and – most importantly – the best chips in Cambridge.

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SECRET CAMBRIDGE: TRINITY TAP

drinker’s delight Words Becky Allen Photographs Marcus Ginns

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ith four turrets, two doors and a statue of Henry VIII, Trinity’s Great Gate is the largest of Cambridge’s College gates. To its right, Sir Isaac Newton’s former rooms look out on to an apple tree that is said to have descended from one at his Lincolnshire home at Woolsthorpe. To the left, however, is a small black alcove housing an old tap and a sign warning: “This water is not fit for drinking.”

Few – including Trinity archivist Jonathan Smith, who has worked at the College for decades – pay it much attention. “I’d never noticed it,” he admits when we meet at the Wren Library to tap into the faucet’s history.

The definitive Architectural History of the University and Colleges of Cambridge (published in 1886) by John Willis Clark and Robert Willis gives a detailed account of the building of the Great Gate – begun in 1518 and completed in 1535 – and a brief description of the College’s far grander water source, the fountain in the Great Court, where construction started in 1601. But an 12 CAM 71

More dramatic versions of the tap’s origins exist, but Chrimes says that, while enjoyable, they are likely to be less accurate

earlier chapter on Trinity contains a detailed diversion into “a remarkable Aqueduct”, part of the history of the site and also, Smith believes, the source of the tap.

The first records of the aqueduct, or conduit, are from an inquisition held at Babraham in 1434, and describe the purchase in 1325 by the House of the Grey Friars of more than 5000 feet of land from more than a dozen landowners – in parcels two feet wide.

Its purpose, according to Willis and Clark, was the making of “a subterranean aqueduct to convey water from a place called Bradrusshe to the manse of the said convent; and that they had proceeded to construct an aqueduct with leaden pipes not only in the aforesaid pieces of land, but also through the common grounds, high streets, and others of the King’s highways, and banks of the river”.

In 1441, after some dispute, possession of the portion of pipe that ran through their quadrangle was granted to King’s Hall before Henry VIII handed over to Trinity the aqueduct in its entirety.

Quite when the tap appeared is unclear; indeed the architecturally undistinguished nozzle merits no mention

by Willis and Clark, but Smith believes that when Grey Friars closed, and with it the conduit’s provision of water to Cambridge residents, the tap outside Trinity’s Great Gate may have been installed to fill this gap in provision of public water. “I can’t prove it, but I think that’s what might have happened,” he says.

Writer Nick Chrimes, author of Cambridge: Treasure Island of the Fens, believes the friars themselves may have provided the tap. “Access to water, be it to drink or to transport goods, was always a vital issue to the people of Cambridge. The sites of the monasteries – nine of them established by the 1300s – were determined by access to fresh water, which was sometimes shared with the townsfolk. Might not the Franciscans have provided it there on the eastern fringe of College property as a source of fresh water?” he asks.

“It was in the interests of all that the risk of plague be reduced by there being ready access for all to fresh water.

Franciscans were renowned for their pastoral care, so it defies logic that they would funnel water across the town without giving the populace controlled access.”

More dramatic versions of the tap’s origins exist, which Chrimes says are enjoyable tales but likely to be less accurate. Legend has it that the tap was placed there to calm the riotous natives, who protested violently when Trinity College enlarged its territory by adding the Great Court. In so doing they cut off access to the fresh water in the centre of the new court. “The truth is more prosaic,” says Chrimes. “There was indeed a drinking well in the centre of what is now Trinity Great Court, on the very spot where the beautifully embellished court fountain now stands.

“I like the legend of the town rioting at the highhanded action of a famous College, but it is unlikely to be true. It seems more likely from the pre-1600 maps that the Trinity fountain was simply a private Trinity College source of water. It might then be, in fact, that the College decently put in a source of water for the townsfolk where the tap now remains.”

Cambridge: Treasure Island of the Fens

by Nicholas Chrimes is published by Hobs Aerie.

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here is a geographical term, riparian. It’s used in the US to imply the space, the wash, the area that sometimes gets wet but isn’t the sea or the land. It’s an uncertain, ever-changing space, a new kind of space, one fraught with risks. But it’s a space that we are going to have to learn to live with – because more of us than ever before are living in it.

Where will we all go when the waters rise? Giant ark-like ships (with a mysteriously inexhaustible supply of cigarettes) as imagined in Kevin Costner’s much-lampooned Waterworld?

Higgledy-piggledy, Swiss Family Robinson-esque boathouses, thrown together from bobbing debris and whatever we scramble to save, like Beasts of the Southern Wild’s ramshackle community? Will the rich be sailing serenely across Covent Garden in lighted gondolas to get to the opera while London crumbles around them, as depicted in Maggie Gee’s ‘cli-fi’ novel The Flood? Will we simply cling to treetops for as long as we can, or run for the high ground, then pray the waters subside – as people do all over the world, every year, in Bangladesh, New Orleans, Pakistan, Thailand? Or will we just be washed away?

The waters are rising Where will we all go when the seas rise? How will the everyday, the ordinary change? Lucy Jolin dips a toe into the water.

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f course, fear of flooding is not new: there is a reason why almost every culture has its deluge myth. “Flooding fascinates the literary imagination,” says Dr Jenny Bavidge, Academic Director for English at the Institute of Continuing Education, who recently ran the first course on ‘cli-fi’ – contemporary fiction that deals with climate change. “There’s the idea of a complete transformation, a surreality. You get strange juxtapositions – ships in the middle of roads, houses turned upside down. In JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, he offers that there might be a kind of beauty in the post-flood world, where the ugly human world is covered over. And then there’s a pleasure in end-of-the-world stories. How would you survive? What would you have left?”

It sounds a tad dramatic to claim that the waters are rising.

But by the 2080s, assuming a 38cm global sea level rise (which is “quite conservative”, according to Dr Tom Spencer, Director of the Cambridge Coastal Research Unit), 634 million people will live below the water level reached during what geographers call the “one in 1000-year storm surge elevation” – in other words, a huge, catastrophic flood. (In the 1990s, 197 million of us lived there.)

But a flooded future doesn’t necessarily mean sudden and dramatic, blockbuster-style waves – though these, of course, have a well-worn place in the imagination. Bavidge says that the scariest flood stories, to her, are those that eschew spectacle in favour of a creeping dread. A steady drip-drip-drip, if you like.

“In Maggie Gee’s The Flood, there’s a sense of people not quite noticing the waters are getting higher,” she says. “The Thames Barrier starts to go in certain areas of London. Parts of London slowly start to flood. They’re the poor areas in the East End. We aren’t that bothered. We could let that bit of the city go. We can let that bit of Norfolk go. It doesn’t matter too much. And slowly, slowly it gets worse and worse. And it might already be happening. It’s quite interesting to think about what you would do in the extreme situation, but what do you do in the time before that?”

The survival of ancient cultures depended on the rise and fall of the waters. Is ours so different? In Cambodia, PhD student Mary Beth Day examined sediment in water tanks to try to find clues as to why the city of Angkor, the seat of the Khmer Empire and the largest urban complex in pre-industrial times, fell and never recovered.

There were many factors involved – fighting with other empires, shifting trade patterns – but there was also an environmental angle.

“They had a complex system of water management, and there are signs that it was struggling,” says Day. “It was the most sophisticated management system available at that time and yet that wasn’t enough to save them. We think of ourselves as being very advanced and able to shape our natural environment, even more so than the Khmer, but it’s just useful to remember that nature is a powerful force. You can’t always overcome it with technology.”

On a dig site in the Kharga Oasis, in Egypt’s western desert, archaeologists have found evidence of people who ate freshwater mussels and catfish, five days’ walk from the Nile valley. “It’s reasonable to assume they were finding these locally,” says Dr Judith Bunbury of the Department of Earth Sciences (who, as a resident of Southend, saw water levels during the recent storm surge come within 40cm of overtopping the town’s sea wall.)

Her work around Kharga examining sediment samples has found that as lakes in the oasis came and went, so did the people. As the rains failed, the people moved to where they could survive. It was a long, slow process. “Over a long period, in the texts and the landscape, you see a dialogue between people and their environment,” she says. “There’s a change of reaction to [Egyptian deity] Seth. He’s a kind of Cain and Abel fellow, the god of the desert storm. He’s regarded as increasingly hostile. There is also lamentation poetry in the Middle Kingdom about how the sea has become dry and the 16 CAM 71

land has become sea. Everything is back to front. People are very sensitive to environment. After all, do you want to live on a flood plain?”

More recently, Giovanni Antonio Canaletto’s 1730s photographic painting of the Doge’s Palace and the Riva degli Schiavoni in Venice, created using a camera obscura (and therefore regarded as highly accurate depictions) shows water levels far below those of today. Along with disappearing islands in the Pacific, Venice is probably the most well-known symbol of a sinking inhabited environment – “though ‘sinking’ is an emotive word,” points out Professor Paul Linden, GI Taylor Professor of Fluid Mechanics at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and a member of the Venice Sustainability Advisory Panel.

“The relationship between the level of the city and the level of the sea has changed over the last few hundred years for two reasons. As happens in many parts of the world, people take groundwater out for fresh water, and there is subsidence as the aquifer has been depleted. That’s stopped in Venice now as the problem has been recognised, which is perhaps not true in other parts of the world. People continue to do it, as they don’t have an alternative for fresh water. Then there is sea level rise, which is a global phenomenon and is progressing.”

But Venice is fighting back. It’s still an inhabited and thriving city, despite the rising waters. It’s a good example, says Linden, of how flood management might look in the future. The city’s World Heritage Site status means that it has been able to attract sufficient resources to guard against future flooding. The authorities are strengthening sea walls, creating artificial salt marshes and beaches, banning damaging practices and building a major flood protection barrier. He wants to see the city become a centre for promulgating this knowledge, helping other regions to develop their own systems.

“I think lessons can be learned,” he says. “I think some of these have already been learned.”

So perhaps, if we want to know what a flooded future is most likely to look like, it’s best for the sake of our own sanity to look to the engineers and architects, rather than the dystopian authors. But flood planning is a complex task. It’s deeply political. It touches on everything from essential infrastructure to quality of life.

“And, of course, people like me are always saying we can’t be sure what the future is going to be like,” says Spencer. “We are not certain. It is very difficult to plan in an uncertain environment. But we are getting better. In the 1953 storm surge, over 300 people died in the UK, and 1800 in the Netherlands. The Dutch warnings were made by radio and by telegram but the radio stations went off air at midnight and the telegrams arrived at offices that were closed on a Sunday.” He also believes we were relatively well-prepared for the storms that battered the UK in December last year. “As well as strengthened defences, we had good forecasting, so we knew on the basis of the weather conditions and the tidal conditions what the surge was going to be like, and when it was going to reach particular locations, and we also had emergency plans that were put into force quickly and effectively.

“We have to manage two elements to flooding – both acute, like storm surge, and chronic, like underlying sea level rise. We need a whole series of different responses – some structural, like flood defences, some ecological, such as maintaining the natural ‘buffers’ of mudflats and saltmarshes, and some societal, like building codes, planning laws and even relocating entire communities – though that’s rarely feasible. But all you can ever do is try to reduce the risk to an acceptable level. You can never get rid of the risk entirely.”

For some, the best possible outcome will be a future where we learn to embrace the sea, rather than try, Canute-like, to hold back the waves. There’s a reason, says researcher Ed Barsley of

A flooded future doesn’t necessarily mean sudden blockbuster-style waves. Bavidge says that the scariest flood stories, to her, are those that eschew spectacle in favour of a creeping dread. A steady drip-drip-drip, if you like.

the Department of Architecture, why so many people long to live next to the water and to interact with it. It sustains life – but it also threatens it. “So why not design strategies which inhabit these transitional spaces between land and sea, and allow communities to remain open to the sea while being safe from it – rather than living in fear behind a concrete sea wall five metres high?” he says.

For his MPhil, Barsley researched the potential of a flood-resilient coastal settlement in Par Docks, Cornwall, on a real-life site where a new eco-town is planned for the future. His multilayered design allows the sea to inhabit the town, with causeways and walkways on varying levels, barriers that can be open or closed depending on the water level, essential services on higher ground, and shops where a flood would simply mean a couple of hours inaccessibility until waters recede, rather than being closed for weeks. It’s a town designed for future, rather than historic, climate conditions.

It may not become a reality in Cornwall, he says – “I imagine planners would be much happier to continue building a vast sea wall and to sit behind it in traditional Barrett homes” – but he is shortly to begin work with the Sri Lankan government on ways to create an integrated social strategy for flood resilience in Batticaloa, a city in the east of the island which was devastated by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

“There is so much scope for designers to help in flooding,” he says. “Engineers, of course, have an essential role to play. But approaching the issue from an architectural and spatial standpoint allows one to consider flood risk from a more holistic and human aspect, and consider how these areas could actually be lived in, and made enriching, thriving spaces – rather than merely concrete fortlike boxes. Sometimes, the edge is where exciting things happen.”

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One eighth of the global population remains undernourished – but the problem is rarely a lack of food, says Stella Nordhagen.

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ith a lot of effort and a little luck, the global community will soon be within reach of a massive victory: meeting the Millennium Development Goal of halving global hunger between 1990 and 2015. Despite this, one-eighth of the global population (and nearly one-third of those in SubSaharan Africa) remains chronically undernourished.

Viewing this stark reality in tandem with projections for rapid urbanisation, population growth, decreasing water and land availability, and an increase in per-capita food demands, it is clear that the global community is at a crucial juncture and needs to reignite agricultural development. Yet to succeed, we need to set aside a fondness for technological ‘silver bullets’ and remember two truths: malnutrition is rarely about not having enough food and food is not all that agriculture delivers.

Academic scholarship has highlighted the fact that food insecurity is often due not to inadequate food availability, but rather impeded access and utilisation, often poverty-based. Upping production, which has

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Harvest for the world Illustration Lara Harwood

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grown tremendously over the past half-century, will not decrease hunger if political, social, and financial barriers constrain access for the disenfranchised.

The food price riots in parts of Asia and Africa during 2007 and 2008 showed how international market dynamics can elevate prices beyond the poor’s purchasing power. Even in the ‘developed’ world, food banks have grown rapidly over past decade. More than half a million UK residents have resorted to food banks and American food insecurity has been exacerbated by cuts to low-income benefits for nearly one million households. Meanwhile, in the past six months alone, conflicts on both sides of Africa and natural disasters in Asia have left many reliant on emergency food aid.

Even if it is accessible, food must be the right kind: millions worldwide suffer from the ‘hidden hunger’ of micronutrient deficiencies. Even with calorie-sufficient diets, millions are left lacking in vitamins and minerals due to limited intake of proteins, fruits, and vegetables.

In their most nefarious incarnation, such deficiencies can exist simultaneously with obesity. In addition to the direct effects of this, such as blindness and stunting, these deficiencies increase infectious disease mortality.

By impinging on child development, they perpetuate lasting health inequalities across generations – even amid bountiful staple grain harvests.

Further, the farmer harvesting grains does not simply reap food. Smallholder farming is the major income source for many food-insecure households – paying tuition for the next generation to escape poverty, for example. As a livelihood, agriculture imparts great pride: crops and livestock meet cultural needs as well as economic ones, providing personal and social meaning.

The ‘cultural’ can thus not be isolated from agricultural decisions. Agriculture embodies complex humanand-ecosystem interactions – yields are fundamentally dependent on natural resources, which farmers’ actions invariably impact, for both good and ill.

The improved seeds, pesticides and fertilisers that fuelled Asia’s Green Revolution have thus far generally failed to take root in variable, risky African soils, and they have increased agriculture’s environmental footprint to about one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Production gains must now be achieved against a backdrop of water scarcity, soil depletion and climate change, which are expected to seriously challenge (though also create opportunities for) agriculture.

These realities make silver bullets elusive in agricultural development – in contrast, for example, to combating certain infectious diseases, where a single shot can make a life-saving difference. A host of interventions, thinking shifts and policies will be needed to end food insecurity.

Work should begin by focusing on smallholders: supplying 80% of the developing world’s food, their poverty is the root of most global hunger. Efforts should seek to enhance the overall resilience of livelihoods, enabling access to more nutritious food – with the knowledge required to use it.

One key example is crop diversification: educating and supporting farmers to grow wider ranges of crops and livestock, including local varieties, can diversify

Crops and livestock meet cultural needs as well as economic ones, providing social and personal meaning

diets and improve micronutrient deficiencies. It can increase profits in marketing, potentially opening up new markets, though this requires both education and improved supply chains (about one-third of global output is lost post-harvest).

Diverse farms should be more resilient to environmental stresses, such as pests. Yet polices such as grain/fertiliser subsidies and over-emphasis on cash (export) crops can incentivise monocultures. Such programmes must be rethought.

Multifaceted problems need multipronged solutions.

Education initiatives – for example, promoting proper nutrition in a child’s crucial first 1000 days – impart the understanding needed for action. Private sector partners, particularly multinational buyers of commodities like cocoa, have the potential to provide training and certification schemes that can benefit both smallholder suppliers and company bottom lines by securing sustainable, high-quality production.

Technology can help bridge physical infrastructure gaps, for example, by using mobile phones to disseminate climate forecasts.

Scientifically bred crops, including biofortified contributions like golden rice – a variety genetically engineered to combat Vitamin A deficiencies – will likely play a role, but those heralding a new Green Revolution should heed the lessons learnt from the first in terms of environmental impact, implications for farmers’ rights, and ability for transfer to resource-poor African contexts. Such efforts should recognise farmers’ considerable knowledge and experience managing complex agro-ecological conditions – this has worth that ‘new seeds’ cannot (and should not) supplant.

Successful approaches must leverage both.

As we approach 2015, the expiry of the Millennium Development Goals and the launch of a potential successor, there needs to be continued emphasis on nutrition, one of the most crucial areas of development – but also one of the messiest. Improving nutrition through agriculture requires long-term, sustained interest and investment. Let’s hope world leaders can stomach this commitment; in so doing, they can make freedom from hunger a global human right.

Stella Nordhagen (Gates Scholar 2008) is a Leland Hunger Fellow with the US Congressional Hunger Center. The Gates Cambridge Scholarship programme was established through a $210m donation from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and is for international postgraduate students who combine outstanding academic ability with a strong commitment to social leadership.

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Concrete feedback

ere,” says Dr Mohammed Elshafie, opening an image on his computer screen that shows a network of snaking cables. “This is optical fibre, the nervous system of infrastructure. We can use it to communicate with different elements, like tunnels, bridges, roads and buildings. And here” – he points at a box onscreen that looks like an early computer, squat and square with winking lights – “the fibres talk to the brain. This is real, it’s not something in a lab in Cambridge that we’re trying to figure out.”

You’re unlikely ever to see any of Elshafie’s work.

It happens deep underground, in construction trenches, pile pits, and behind the temporary hoardings of building sites. But if you’ve ever visited London you’ll certainly have walked across it, maybe have journeyed through it – and in future you may even live above it or empty your bathrooms into it. He and his colleagues (Elshafie frequently acknowledges the team at the Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction – CSIC – and the leadership of CSIC head Professor Robert Mair, Professor Kenichi Soga and Professor Campbell Middleton) are fitting London one railway tunnel, deep basement and sewer at a time with these intelligent fibres.

Dr Mohammed Elshafie wants to give London not just a brain, but an entire nervous system.

Words Victoria James Photograph Marcus Ginns

CV 2002 BSc Hons, Civil Engineering, University of Khartoum 2003 Structural engineer at Komatsu Engineering 2004 UK Government Overseas Research Studentship Award and Gates Cambridge Scholarship

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2008 PhD, Geotechnical Engineering; Teaching Fellow, Robinson College 2009 Geotechnical engineer, Geotechnical Consulting Group 2009-11 Research Associate, Engineering Department 2011 Laing O’Rourke Lecturer in Construction Engineering

Their hope is that one day it will become the world’s first “smart city”.

Achieving that transformation is less a matter of nuts and bolts than one of wires and boxes. The business of making infrastructure smarter is, conceptually at least, surprisingly simple. Traditionally, external sensors have been placed at specific points on, for example, a tunnel wall or construction pile core, that feed back readings from that particular spot. CSIC’s team instead thread their fibre optic cables throughout a structure’s interior, producing a complete picture of what is happening within it.

This is most useful in revealing the internal stresses that are vital when assessing a structure’s strength and safety. But potentially a great range of information can be captured: temperature, throughput and condition. And with that knowledge will come, in the future, the ability to manipulate these variables: to turn up heating or cooling, to regulate a bridge’s load or the flow of a tunnel’s contents – be it sewage, cars or commuters.

But if Elshafie – a Fellow of Robinson and Lecturer at the Laing O’Rourke Centre for Construction Engineering and Technology – is a visionary, he is an eminently practical one. Much of his time is spent out on construction sites or in tunnels deep underground, kitted out in a hard hat and protective gear, listening to endless health and safety briefings. That’s because in order to change our cities, we first have to effect major transformations in the way industry builds those cities.

“The construction industry has been doing things one way for years and years,” he says. “But we do not learn from the things we do, and these days there’s less money. We can’t keep doing things the same way.” When he says ‘we’ in observations like this, he is talking not about the CSIC team, but of building contractors, engineers and developers – an entire industry that he and his fellow scientists must win over to their new way of doing things. Elshafie, who spent some time working in industry between the various stages of his studies, is adept at putting himself in their shoes, but it’s no easy task. Despite project costs that can run into the high millions, profit margins are often as low as 2 to 3%. Consequently, risk aversion is high. The scientists must frequently demonstrate not only that their data enables the construction of safer, stronger infrastructure, but that it will also deliver efficiency savings – and won’t take up precious time on the job.

On one particular project – he won’t say which – the Cambridge team was asked to do a dummy-run demonstration of their

technique. “We were timed with a stopwatch,” he recalls, with a smile. “And when we got the go-ahead to participate, we had to make sure we kept to within 20 seconds of that time.”

Their work isn’t just about helping contractors increase their margins; Elshafie says the benefits of smart infrastructure flow to everyone. Many of the super-scale projects CSIC works on draw on the public purse, such as the mighty Crossrail extensions across Greater London, Essex and Kent.

Others – such as the new tunnels for the National Grid, or Thames Water’s Lee Tunnel – should deliver improved capacity and efficiency that will mean better and cheaper services for customers.

Still others bring environmental benefits, such as the City of London development at 6 Bevis Marks (neighbour to the famous Gherkin, 30 St Mary Axe) which won a major industry sustainability prize in 2013.

The existing building on the site was demolished, but what remained uncertain – until Elshafie and the CSIC team came along – was whether its foundations could be re-used. Conventional wisdom said it could not, and Cementation Skanska faced the significant engineering challenge of extracting the old piles and creating new ones – a disruptive and costly process. But Elshafie and his colleagues, working together with Cementation Skanska, were able to establish that the existing foundations were both sound and strong. As a result, the new structure went up on top of the entire original ‘basement box’, shaving two months off the construction time and saving over 1000 tonnes of CO2 in the process.

But though Elshafie’s work is inseparable from the activities of the construction industry, and inspires innovation within it, he and his colleagues at CSIC remain, first and foremost, scholars and researchers. “It is the questions that drive us,” he says. Consequently plans are in hand for a spin-off commercial enterprise, in which trained experts will deploy CSIC’s technologies in more routine projects, while the research team continues to push boundaries in cutting-edge construction works.

Elshafie’s passion for engineering cities began early. He was born in Omdurman, Sudan, one of three districts comprising Khartoum State, which is partitioned by the confluence of the White Nile and the Blue Nile. Those districts were, during Elshafie’s childhood, linked by only three bridges, over one or two of which his father drove during every day’s school run. “Every time we crossed one of these bridges,” he recalls, “I would marvel at the beauty of their massive structures, and also the vital role they played

in keeping the whole country alive.

That early wonder at the bridges, and an awareness of the significant challenges posed by the annual flooding of the twinned Nile, led Elshafie to study Civil Engineering, first at Khartoum University, where he graduated top of his year, and then – thanks to the award of an Overseas Research Studentship, Commonwealth Trust Scholarship and a Gates Scholarship – in Cambridge, where he took his PhD and has stayed ever since.

The experience of living in Cambridge is, in some ways, surprisingly like Khartoum, he says. “There, everybody knows everybody; I just have to stop anyone on the street and within a few minutes we’ll find a common friend or distant family member. And here, thanks to Cambridge’s tight academic community, it’s not unusual to find connections in the same way when meeting people.”

There are surprising similarities, too, in the civil engineering challenges both cities face. Where Khartoum had congested bridges and river flooding, Cambridge must cope with congested streets and storm flooding. “Underground facilities like tunnelling,” says Elshafie, “could offer an excellent solution for dealing with both in Cambridge.” (Indeed, Professor Mair sparked debate last year when he proposed tunnelling bus and light-rail routes beneath Cambridge’s centre.)

“Cities everywhere are becoming more crowded,” Elshafie explains. “You need more infrastructure for them and it will be progressively more complex. And it’s not only complexity at the moment of construction; it’ll reach into the future as that infrastructure ages. Another generation will be faced with questions about do they repair something, replace it, or rebuild it.”

In October 2013, the British Government launched the Smart Cities Forum to ensure that UK cities and companies are at the forefront of what the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills predicts will be a market worth £240bn globally by 2020. Elshafie, meanwhile, is convening the world’s first academic conference on the use of fibre optics sensing in civil infrastructure, to be held at Robinson this summer, and he hopes that scholars from as far afield as Japan, China, and Canada will attend.

“We think we’re on the top of our game,” he says. “But now we need to share that knowledge. My hope is that soon it will be hard to have projects without this sort of technology. In the future, a city will be like a vehicle – you get in and it can tell you the status of everything important you need to know.” www-smartinfrastructure.eng.cam.ac.uk www.construction.cam.ac.uk

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Me2 Digital technology is shifting the focus away from our physical lives towards a virtual existence.

Kathleen Richardson argues that this change presents a challenge to the human spirit.

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n the 2009 science fiction movie Surrogates, humans stay at home and send out their avatars to do their work. The film forecasts a state of existence where life is lived away from the physical body, where people have abandoned in-person, embodied interactions for virtual ones. With the mass popularity of Facebook, Twitter and other digital technologies offering adults (and increasingly children) the opportunity to participate in a life independent of locality, Surrogates reflects the contemporary reality of ‘social’ digital life more than any academic paper or research study. Because today we are, in my view, already having a collective out-of-body experience.

Walter Benjamin’s stunning 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, about technology, art, politics and mimesis, examines the rise of mechanical technologies. Benjamin believed that the mechanical reproduction of art transformed the art object itself: the movie in place of the theatrical performance, the photograph in place of the painting and the phonograph in place of the live concert.

How does this relate to digital technologies and the mediated self?

Take drama. In the theatre, actors and the audience are co-present, engaged and influencing the performance and action of the other, but on a film set the action as experienced by the audience is mediated by the camera. Their purchase of tickets may influence the popularity of the film, but the audience cannot influence the performance.

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If we extend this analogy to social networking sites we see a similar pattern. Users are not interacting with a person, but a machine. The action takes place offstage and feedback is limited compared to the dialogue that would take place face-to-face. Of course the mechanical and digital reproduction of live experiences have been emancipating people from the moment for some time (I am, after all, using a computer to write this document and it will be delivered to an audience online and in print). But what happens when all of life can be experienced digitally?

A study by researchers at the University of Dundee, Charting the Digital Lifespan, investigates how business is developing technologies that span the life cycle, from the birth of a child to their death and beyond, into an afterlife. These digital imprints in the virtual world show how it is increasingly possible to recreate every aspect of the lived and present life in the online world. Developments such as Google Glass allow individuals to live in both worlds simultaneously and blur the boundary between the digital and physical world. But perhaps more importantly, the virtual world becomes not just an alternative forum for existence, but a complete mirror of life – a double. The mirror image is always distorted, because inherent in the mirror is only a reflection devoid of sensual embodiment. Life will be increasingly lived in a state of astral projection.

When I first started researching online social networking use in 2008, it was clear it was still a new and exciting technology. The participants in my study explained how new social rules about politeness and social acceptability were only just developing in a space like Facebook. I called having a presence in the online world having a proxy self, a kind of deputy that acted in cyberspace.

As technology develops, the question becomes: which is the proxy and which the authentic self? Does it matter? To have an out-of-body-experience is not necessarily negative. Daydreams and escapes into fantasy are an important aspect of life. In some cultures and religious practices the out-of-body experience is considered a highly prized state of existence, allowing the individual to experience the divine. Today, however, it is clear that removal from the real world is no longer confined to Facebook or even social media. Blogs, music sites, gaming sites and news forums all invite users to become part of an ‘online community’. Taken as individual acts, this participation would not be meaningful – it would not create what Benjamin termed a loss of ‘aura’, or authenticity. But when not just thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, but billions and billions of tiny interactions take place out-of-body, removed from the physical and present self, I believe something fundamental is lost. We increasingly live life for its mirrored, and, I would argue, less authentic double.

Some critics of digital life warn of the neurological transformations that, they say, result from increasing online use. It is difficult to find a direct correlation between a specific type of behaviour and a difference in brain chemistry and patterns. But it is not difficult to see that, increasingly, our friends, family and coworkers are immersed in these spaces. When a subject

Academics have tended to see the rise of online participation as a challenge to the retreat from public life, but I believe that in fact, the web is part of the retreat

of my study told me “I am often walking down the street thinking of what my next status update might be” she was in fact articulating what many users of online networks are also thinking much of the time.

Experience – a thought, feeling, image – is steadily being reduced to data that can be posted online.

These trends push people away from the moment and this does have consequences for life and existence.

Technologists are forever clamouring to further immerse us online, to get us engaged in a new app, game or site. For less than £20 you can buy a T-shirt that detects wireless signals, enabling you to get instantly online. You can also buy trousers that will charge your phone, meaning you will always have a fully functional communication channel. Taken individually these things would not present a problem, but as a cultural process that is going to intensify in the future, being perpetually ‘on’ should give us a great deal more pause for thought.

But why do so many of our human needs seem to be better filled through digital life? In his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam analyses the decline of public engagement in collective life and membership of the ‘traditional organisation’. Putnam notes in one of his chapters that the rise of the web and social media provide one area where people are re-engaging.

Academics, including myself, have tended to see the rise of participation in the web as a challenge to the retreat from public life, but I now believe that in fact, the web is part of the retreat. If Web 2.0 represents a shift from hierarchical structures to democratic ones – a digital world where we can all potentially participate in broadcasting ourselves – in practice that must also mean we are all participating in mediating our real lives. And that real life becomes mere material for the creation of a digital performance.

Dr Kathleen Richardson is an anthropologist of robots, autism and digital social networking.

The images that accompany this piece are from the critically acclaimed series Babel Tales, by Danish photographer Peter Funch. Exploring the edges between documentary and manipulated photography, Babel Tales focuses on human relations (or the lack thereof) in big cities. Shooting in exactly the same position over a period of time, Funch superimposes images on top of each other to create a fictional work based on documentary photography.

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Opposite page: Library of St Peter and St Walburga, 1555, Zutphen, Netherlands This parish library has remained largely unchanged since its construction, providing a clear idea of what a medieval lectern library in northern Europe looked like.

The books are chained to the lecterns.

Right: Trinity Hall library, c. 1600, Cambridge These particularly fine standing lecterns are interesting because they also feature lower desks, which pull out from beneath the shelf below the reading desk.

Originally there would have been just one shelf in this position and the lower area would have provided space for the readers’ legs.

Left: Book carrels, c. 1400, The Cloister, Gloucester Cathedral Medieval cloisters were often used as libraries.

In most cases, benches and desks were simply placed in the existing space. At Gloucester Cathedral the monks commissioned the construction of twenty stone carrels, each with its own windows.

Right: Duke Humfrey’s Library, 1598, Oxford This room, now part of the Bodleian Library, dates from the late 15th century. The current fittings were installed

by Thomas Bodley in 1598, making this one of the earliest stall-system libraries.

Reading light Ensuring bookworms have sufficient light to read by has obsessed the creators of libraries since the 16th century says Dr James Campbell.

Photographs William Pryce

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he problem of providing adequate light to read by is as old as reading itself. The solution has challenged the builders of libraries throughout the ages. Artificial lighting has been used in libraries for centuries, but it has always been a subject of concern.

Throughout the ages countless libraries have been lost to fires – a notable recent example being the 18th century Duchess Anna Amelia library in Weimar which burnt down in 2004, thanks to faulty electrical wiring. The usual solution has been to ban flames. Many people remember the oath to ‘never kindle a naked flame’ required to obtain a readers’ card for the Bodleian Library in Oxford. In the days when candles and oil lamps were the only methods of lighting, such bans meant that libraries could only be lit by windows and thus the design of windows and their relationship with the working surfaces in all early libraries was crucial.

Imagine a medieval college library. What do you see? Most of us automatically think of a long room with tall sets of bookcases set at right angles to the walls down both sides. In fact this configuration, commonly seen today in old libraries in Oxford and Cambridge colleges, did not appear until long after the invention of printing, in the late 16th century. Most of the surviving examples actually date from the 17th century.

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The true medieval library is furnished with low lecterns in rows down each side. Benches are fixed to the floor in front of them. Books are chained firmly to the lecterns to prevent them being stolen, the number of books being limited by the space on the lecterns. There are no shelves at all, and the reader sits at the appropriate desk for the particular book they want to read. And critically, the windows are set low-down close to the surface of the desk on each side of the room. Because glass is expensive they are comparatively small.

Today only three rooms give us any idea of what such libraries might have looked inside: the libraries of Trinity Hall in Cambridge (c.1600), the Biblioteca Malatestiana in Cesena (1452) and the parish library of the church of St Peter and St Walburga in Zutphen (1555). Many other original medieval library rooms do survive but all their fittings have been removed or altered. One of the features that gives them away is the position of their windows: low down, close to the surface of where the desks would have been, in pairs, with space for the lecterns between them.

Lectern libraries were perfectly adequate to house the tiny medieval collections that rarely exceeded a few hundred volumes. The invention of the printing press in the middle of the 15th century meant that the cost of books began to fall and the numbers being produced increased dramatically. Libraries then had to change to accommodate bigger collections – no longer hundreds, but rather tens of thousands of books.

In the older libraries of Oxford and Cambridge the lecterns were often removed and replaced by the taller bookcases without much in the way of further alteration. But the windows, originally designed to light low lecterns, struggled to light the centre of the room and such libraries are inevitably dark as a result.

The library of Queens’ or the refitted Duke Humfrey’s Library in Oxford show the effect. Sometimes, as at Merton College Oxford, dormer windows were introduced to improve the situation. A better solution was to build an entirely new library with much larger windows, preferably set high above the bookcases.

While medieval libraries were often quite low spaces, post-medieval libraries became great lofty halls, with tall windows set high in the walls above – the libraries of St John’s and Trinity are some of the finest example of this type. Even with these architectural innovations, the emphasis remained on windows.

Libraries were closed after dark and the use of candles or lanterns was strictly banned.

The title of ‘most lavishly-decorated libraries in history’ belongs to the 18th-century Rococo libraries, particularly those in the catholic monasteries of Austria and Southern Germany. These too were lit entirely by Top right: The Wren Library 1695, Trinity College, Cambridge The windows, ranged on both sides and at both ends high above the cases, flood the interior with light. The shelves are arranged to form alcoves along each side, a revolutionary new layout that was to be highly influential on later library design.

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Right: Admont Abbey Library, 1776, Admont, Austria The books in the original collection were rebound in white at enormous expense to match the rest of the decorative scheme. The staircases to the galleries are concealed behind ingenious secret doors in the four corners of the wings.

natural light. In winter, when the temperature outside is well below freezing even in the middle of the day, these libraries can be very cold indeed. Just as they were not lit, they were not heated.

Visitors often wonder how anyone could work in such conditions and the answer is that they didn’t.

The monks using these libraries made an appointment with the librarian and collected their books, taking them back to their cells, where they could read them in comfort, huddled close to the stove. The libraries themselves remained unlit and unheated and, for the most part, locked up. There were only the occasional indications of lighting in this period. There seem, for example, to have been wall mounted oil lamps in the Duchess Anna Amalia Library (1766) already referred to in the 18th century and in the library of the Mafra National Palace (1771) in Portugal, but these seem to have been exceptions rather than the rule.

Artificial lighting and heating only seriously started to appear in the 19th century. The great advance was the invention of gas lighting. Gas street lamps were used in Paris in the 1820s, but it was not until the 1850s that gas lighting became relatively common. Its huge advantage was cost: gas lighting was 75% cheaper than its equivalents and comparatively much safer. It was fitted in the library of the Assemblée Nationale (183047) in Paris, which also boasted a set of fireplaces in the centre of the room with ingenious concealed flues.

The use of gas was also an important factor in the design of one of the most celebrated libraries of the period, the Bibliothèque Ste Geneviève (1850). The brief for the building required the use of iron because of the perceived increased risk of fire. In response the architect, Henri Labrouste (1801-1875) produced a dramatic reading room covered by huge iron arches that looked more like a railway station than a library.

The rest of the 19th century saw an increase in the use of both iron and gas lighting in libraries. The greatest advantage of gas lighting was that library opening hours were no longer as restricted. The greatest 19th century libraries exploited this combination of gas and iron to spectacular effect. In America a series of libraries were built with multi-storey iron stacks ranged around central halls. The first was the Astor Library in New York which opened in 1854. The best surviving example is the Peabody Library in Baltimore completed in 1878 and designed by the little known architect Edmund Lind. Here, five storeys of books wrap around a great hall lit by a glazed roof and gaslights mounted on the walls. It remains one of the most impressive libraries ever built, although seldom visited.

Despite these innovations, when the British Library’s great Round Reading Room was completed in 1850, it was still entirely naturally lit, and the great iron stacks that surrounded it were lit from above through glass Top left: The George Peabody Library, 1866, Baltimore, United States Designed by Edmund Lind, this is the finest surviving example of an iron-stack library, a type peculiar to the United States in the 19th century.

Bottom left: University Library, 1842, Cambridge By the 19th century the rooms housing the University Library at Cambridge were wholly inadequate. After a series of competitions, Charles Robert Cockerell’s design was chosen.

The main library is a long, barrel-vaulted room.

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roofs and perforated iron floors. The library had to close when the sun went down which meant very short days in winter. It also closed during the days when London’s notorious smogs resulted in poor visibility.

By the late 19th century, librarians were forming into recognised professional bodies and beginning to question the use of gas. At a conference on library design the librarian of the City of London Corporation, WH Overall, declared that “the two great enemies to libraries were architects and gas”.

His objection to architects is another story, but his criticism of gas was that in libraries such as the Peabody, it produced fumes that had a deleterious effect on the books, particularly those shelved nearest the ceiling. The books in these locations quickly fell apart. Many librarians also still saw gas as a fire hazard. The answer? Electricity.

Joseph Swan gave the first demonstration of his incandescent light bulb in a library on 20 October 1880 in Westgate, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Edison patented his more reliable bulb the same year.

However, the first libraries lit by electricity predated both. Today we tend to forget the existence of that first type of electrical light (arc lighting) because it was relatively short-lived. Invented at the beginning of the 19th century, it only became commercially viable in the 1870s and was soon replaced by incandescent lighting. On 24 February 1879 the British Museum installed eight arc lamps on 15ft high posts in the reading room as an experiment. Soon the Museum had its own steam-powered generators and could stay open in the evenings and during bad weather. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that libraries became routinely constructed with electric lights. By that period artificial lighting had become firmly established. Public libraries, which had opened in increasing numbers after 1850, wanted to be accessible in the evenings and after work. Artificial lighting was thus essential.

The libraries designed in the 20th century became increasingly reliant on electricity to function. The stacks of the New York Public Library (1911) were constructed underneath the main reading room, the books being carried to the main floor by electric lifts. The steel stacks themselves were so deep that even though they had windows it would have been virtually impossible to find anything without electric lights. The same could be said of the open stacks of our own Cambridge University Library (1931-1933) designed by Giles Gilbert Scott (who is best known for designing the British telephone box and Bankside Power Station, now Tate Modern).

But it was not only the stacks that became unusable without lights: many modern libraries had internal corridors with no windows at all, which were entirely unusable without electric light. By this time, libraries were no longer designed to be used with the lights off. Today, as we try to decrease our dependency on electricity, we need to look again at designing spaces for work and study that do not need artificial light all the time. In this, as in so many things, the future has much to learn from the past if it knows where to look.

Perhaps the medieval library is a good place to start.

The National Library of China, 2008, Beijing, China Designed by the German firm Jürgen Engel Architects, the library has a reading room |that is roughly square on plan and steps downwards, getting progressively smaller at each level.

Bodleian Library Storage Facility, 2009, Swindon The scale of this warehouse for books is difficult to appreciate. The main space (shown) is designed to hold 8 million books stored in barcoded plastic trays.

Dr James Campbell is a Senior University Lecturer and a Fellow of Queens’ College. His book, a joint project with photographer Will Pryce (Jesus 1990), The Library: A World History is published by Thames and Hudson.

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Work doesn’t have to be serious, argues Professor Patrick Bateson – in fact, excellence often requires many of the qualities of play.

Illustrations Graham Rawle

Men at play S

ir Alexander Fleming was famous for his playfulness. He was described, disapprovingly, by his boss as treating research like a game and finding it all great fun. When asked what he did, Fleming said: “I play with microbes… it is very pleasant to break the rules and to be able to find something that nobody had thought of.” In the course of such play he discovered the antibacterial properties of penicillin, for which he was awarded a Nobel prize.

Another famously playful scientist and Nobel prizewinner was Richard Feynman. When Feynman was getting bored with physics at an early stage in his career, he wrote: “Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing – it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with.” He decided that he would play with physics again, irrespective of how it important it might be. Then, while he was playing, he made fundamental contributions to nuclear physics.

Intrigued by these stories of playful scientists, I have explored the role of playfulness in creativity with my colleague Paul Martin.

We found that playfulness facilitates creativity and hence innovation in both the natural world and human society.

Play is spontaneous and rewarding to the individual. It is intrinsically motivated and its performance is a goal in itself. Play occurs in a protected context when the player is neither ill nor stressed.

It is often incomplete or exaggerated relative to the non-playful behaviour of adults and it is performed repeatedly. Confusion arises because the word ‘play’ has many different meanings, some of which refer to aspects of behaviour and thinking that are a far cry from being playful. Rule-governed competitive sports and many games are ‘played’, but are all too often treated as being deadly serious.

Apart from its varied colloquial usages, the term play, as used by biologists and psychologists, is a broad term denoting almost any activity that is not ‘serious’ or ‘work’. This way of characterising play led to the unfortunate and false conclusion that it wasn’t a serious topic for study. But children spend a great deal of their time playing when allowed to do so, as do most young mammals and many birds. Adults also play, though they do less of it than when they were young. As George Bernard Shaw noted: “We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.”

However, play uses up time and energy and sometimes leads to injury.

The benefits may not emerge until much later in life, sometimes as astonishing insights.

Play generates new ways of dealing with the environment, most of which lead nowhere, but some of which turn out to be useful CAM 71 35

Wolfgang Köhler described 90 years ago the apparently immediate and insightful understanding by chimpanzees of challenges he had set them. When he suspended a banana out of reach of the chimps, they quickly piled wooden boxes on top of each other so that they could reach the banana. In another experiment, Köhler gave the chimps sticks that could be slotted together and used to reach bananas that had been placed more than an arm’s length outside their cage. The chimps seemed to have a clear idea of what to do in each case. To use Köhler’s phrase, they were “unwaveringly purposeful”.

No trial and error was required at the time they solved the problems; they seemed to have insight into the tasks that Köhler had set for them. It was as though they said to themselves: “Aha, I know what to do.” How did they do it? Young chimps readily play with sticks, and if they have played with bamboo sticks they discover that a smaller stick can be threaded inside the hole of a larger one, creating a longer stick. A chimp that had prior opportunities to play with sticks solved the problem of retrieving a banana that was beyond arm’s length, whereas those that had no such prior opportunities failed.

Dolphins are famously playful, producing large numbers of novel acts when young. In the wild, adult dolphins blow a screen of bubbles underwater to drive fish to the surface, where they can catch them more easily. Some blow bubbles from their blowhole when underwater and become expert at blowing rings of bubbles, with which they then play. They are able to harness these skills acquired through play for the serious business of catching prey later in life.

Playful behaviour and playful thought can be experiences that later generate radically new approaches to challenges set by the physical and social environment.

Play generates new ways of dealing with the environment, most of which lead nowhere but some of which turn out to be useful.

Creativity is displayed when an individual develops a new form of behaviour or, in humans, an original idea, regardless of its practical uptake and subsequent application. Innovation means implementing a novel form of behaviour or an idea in order to obtain a practical benefit that may then be adopted by others.

Innovation involves transforming creative ideas into practical outcomes that are adopted by others. Being a successful innovator requires different attributes, such as analytical skills, determination and persistence, that are distinct from the cognitive features underpinning creativity. In organisations that depend on their ability to come up with new ways of solving problems, those responsible for generating the new ideas are often allowed free time to think laterally and explore wild ideas, without being punished for wasting time.

The free flow of ideas is facilitated throughout the day by companies such as Google, which has canteens that provide free food where people can meet to talk. Other innovative companies, such as Netflix, have removed administrative burdens from potentially creative employees in order to develop a productive environment.

Organisations that rely on innovation must also be willing to risk more failures in the initial creative stages.

Associations have been found between creativity and the stable personality characteristic of being open to new experiences.

Moreover, certain forms of mental disorder have been linked with the production of original thought. Even so, people who might be judged as lacking in originality can be helped to become more creative. The exhaustion experienced by those who face too many demands, distractions that fragment thought, plain laziness, and lack of direction can all get in the way of being creative. These barriers can be overcome by freeing up time from the pursuit of predictable goals, and by avoiding time-wasting distractions such as aimlessly watching television. Daydreaming, far from being a wasteful activity, can lead to links being formed between disparate bodies of thought.

Playfulness in adult life affects the readiness with which people develop new ideas Some psychoactive drugs, taken in small doses, enable people to find associations that eluded them beforehand. Finding the link between seemingly unrelated words becomes easier after drinking a couple of glasses of wine. What is the word that links ‘violin’, ‘tie’ and ‘bells’? The answer, ‘bow’, suddenly pops into one’s head.

Interventions that provide children with greater opportunities for play make them more creative. Conversely, and worryingly, fears about safety and the pressures of school curricula are reducing opportunities for free play. These trends are associated with a decline in the ability to come up with new ideas. Playfulness in adult life affects the readiness with which people develop new ideas and has a broad influence on human relations. Given the importance of play in child development, those involved in education should take note.

In our book Play, Playfulness, Creativity and Innovation, Dr Paul Martin and I argue that a strong case can be made for the role of play and playfulness in fostering creativity and enabling people to have more enjoyable lives. We hope that our conclusions will interest those who are concerned with creativity and innovation, whether for commercial benefit or the public good.

Sir Patrick Bateson FRS is Emeritus Professor of Ethology at Cambridge. He was Provost of King’s from 1988 to 2003.

Play, Playfulness, Creativity and Innovation by Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin is published by Cambridge University Press.

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Jill Calder

University matters My Cambridge Reading list Cambridge soundtrack A sporting life Prize crossword

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Extracurricular CAM 71 39

Extracurricular

University matters International engagement Dr Jennifer Barnes is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for International Strategy Jim Spencer

I

n April 2013, in Melbourne, Australia, the Vice-Chancellor delivered the Richard Larkins Oration on the theme “Universities and the Poorest Billion”. The audience, made up of government officials, philanthropists, journalists, business and academic leaders, heard him argue for greater recognition of the role of universities in generating and communicating new understanding. Woven throughout were two strands: the way universities continue to reinvent the interplay between the theoretical and practical; and how universities must extend their contribution across institutions, borders and governments. In order to be a world-leading university, you must make good not only your place in the world, but your responsibility to the world.

Cambridge has long been innately international. Over the centuries, scholars, politicians, poets and revolutionaries (often the same person) have come from around the world, seeking to experience the University’s ambience and expectations. Many leave lasting words or equations, such as Erasmus’s translation of the New Testament, the Chinese poet Xu Zhimo’s Farewell to Cambridge, which is known throughout China, or Ray Dolby’s PhD thesis discovering a way to extract ‘noise’ through x-ray microanalysis. That Cambridge brings ideas to the world is well understood. But there is an essential corollary: we need the right partnerships and people around the world, and increasingly this means being in other parts of the world.

We start with the premise of understanding of our internal strengths, existing and emerging, and what makes us distinct from other universities. Since 2010, we have established 12 University-wide strategic initiatives and seven strategic networks, each of which have international components. When I travel to meet Cambridge alumni, potential partner organisations, and advocates on every continent, I am aware of how much expectation others have of us, based on their knowledge of the University’s contribution throughout its history, combined with their knowledge of significant developments or disruptive technologies in their own countries. Our approach is not rooted in expansion, but in establishing new work based on the most exceptional opportunities, alliances and individuals around the world. Today, that means working with our international part-

While other universities are establishing overseas campuses, Cambridge is basing its approach on partnerships

ners on clean energy in Singapore, translational medicine in India, or urbanisation in China. In Africa, the Carnegie Corporation has hailed our recent work as the exemplar of how a university should engage, bringing the most advanced research and partnerships together, in-country, to build stronger universities, public policy and government institutions.

If we have been reticent in articulating the extent of our international engagement, it is only because we have not, until recently, chosen to present the University through an international lens. Yet our collegiate University encompasses Colleges, departments, a copyright library, College collections, museums, the Institute of Continuing Education, Cambridge Enterprise,

Cambridge Assessment and Cambridge University Press, each of which is international; the last two, in particular, have long been integrated in business and education sectors around the world, and this, too, distinguishes us from other institutions.

In discussion, we frequently test emerging proposals through our mission: “To contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.”

In defining our international approach, we have gone back to first principles: significant numbers of longstanding international collaborations, often beginning between individuals, across the sciences and humanities. Increasingly we see a pattern of these early collaborations evolving into international teams, which then require additional post-doctoral researchers and create opportunities for PhD students.

While other universities are establishing overseas campuses, Cambridge is basing its approach on partnerships, determined by the academics and their in-country partners. Jargon would describe this as “bottom-up meets top-down”. This could be mistaken for a reactive stance, but in fact the University has always been led by academics generating the agenda.

Our aim is to identify and support those whose are leading work with an inherently international dimension, then putting in place the infrastructure for sustainable incountry programmes.

In all this, our alumni are crucial – helping us build new networks and navigate complex systems. In 2013, we established an India Circle of Advisers, comprised of academic, government and business leaders based in India, to review our projects and advise on future initiatives. It is expected we will extend this approach to other parts of the world. The International Strategy Office welcomes approaches from alumni. If you have not already done so, get a sense of what we’re doing by having a look at the Global Cambridge pages on our website and find out more about what the University is planning in your part of the world.

www.cam.ac.uk/global-cambridge

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Extracurricular

Working in a Cambridge lab can be intense.

Here, four graduates reflect on their experiences in the lab of Professor Beverley Glover, Director of Cambridge University Botanic Garden.

Interviews Becky Allen Portraits Marcus Ginns

Cambridge taught me to be a good lab citizen: my current students laugh as I’m always reminding them about it, but it’s about reordering things when you use them up, using equipment when you’ve booked it

My Cambridge Greg Mellers

Current PhD student When I tell people I’m a biologist, they usually think I must spend my days in the Amazon, whereas I spend most of my life in the lab moving colourless liquids from one place to another.

I’m working on spot development in daisies. We use a model species from South Africa that has a really complicated spot structure that mimics the plant’s pollinator, something only seen before in orchids.

It’s interesting because it suggests a novel evolution of this response in a different species. If we can understand how it has evolved we could put it into crop systems – and if you can increase pollination, you can increase fruit set and crop yield.

People in the lab are really helpful.

You hear horror stories about people never seeing their supervisor, but Beverley’s always on hand. The post-docs take a lot of time out of their day to help us. You can spend an entire PhD troubleshooting if you don’t have that additional help, so having people who are hands-on and practical is very useful.

I enjoy what I do, it gets me out of bed. I came into the PhD thinking I wanted to stay in academia, but actually very few people end up as postdocs or group leaders or professors. I need to think about what I can do with a science degree, because I want to stay in science.

Left: Greg Mellers and Professor Beverley Glover

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Extracurricular

Dr Meredith Murphy Westwood

Dr Elinor Thompson

Dr Kit Wilkins

Tree conservationist, Morton Arboretum Illinois, USA

Senior lecturer, University of Greenwich

Patent Attorney

I’m totally at home in botanic gardens, they are my favourite places to be. I love the diversity of plant life – understanding how flowers evolved to attract their pollinators.

It’s one of the reasons, we think, why flowering plants are so diverse.

There were days during my postdoc when I’d sit in the Botanic Garden and think: “This is an awesome job.” We were looking at structural colour in flowers, how physical features of the flower refract or manipulate light to create a colour that’s not based on pigment.

We spent a ton of time in the Botanic Garden using dental wax to make casts of petals. When you fill this “negative” with a clear epoxy resin you get a really accurate model of the petal, and then you can see how it plays with light.

The lab felt like a family. You have this support structure of other students around you – it was a nice, happy environment and felt cosy. I loved our biweekly beer hours.

Sometimes there’d be costumes or themes and it was fun to get everyone together and talk to people – really senior academics – who you’d not normally approach.

I’ve just started a new job as a tree conservation specialist at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, a western suburb of Chicago. I’ll be working with botanic gardens and arboreta around the world to support protection of endangered trees, so I’ll have an excuse to come back to Cambridge.

You can be unselfconsciously enthusiastic about your science in Cambridge because Cambridge is uniquely geeky. Everybody’s enthusiasm creates a virtuous circle: if others are enthused, you feel enthused too.

With distance from the lab, I’ve realised one of the things it taught me was to channel research, not to stifle it.

Experiments will do what they’ll do – that’s the point.

I’m now a senior lecturer at the University of Greenwich. I do the classic lecturer role of teaching, research, academic citizenship, learned society committees and refereeing.

What I’ve brought from Cambridge to my current group is being a good academic citizen. It’s about giving back, understanding that you need to contribute to conferences, to peer review, to attend colleagues’ research seminars, and it’s about setting a good example.

Cambridge also taught me to be a good lab citizen: my current students laugh as I’m always reminding them about it.

It’s about re-ordering things when you use them up, using equipment when you’ve booked it, and sticking to good lab etiquette.

Postdoc 2003–2009

PhD student and postdoc 2005–2011

I grew up in the lab. I was 21 when I joined as a PhD student in 2000 and 28 when I left as a postdoc – a quarter of my life. I grew in confidence and self-belief hugely. I had to work independently to get anything done.

My knowledge grew a huge amount too because I got the chance to teach.

It was valuable experience but it made me realise that academic life wasn’t for me. I was never comfortable up there presenting in front of a big crowd. My research didn’t go as well as it could have.

I found it hard to publish, and in science it’s publish or perish.

While I found it frustrating, at the time I was fascinated and excited. I enjoyed designing experiments and solving problems. So becoming a patent attorney seemed a good way to combine using science daily with a new challenge.

I’ve been a patent attorney at Dehns since leaving the lab in Cambridge in 2007, advising inventors how to get protection for their inventions. Lots of clients are university spinouts, people working in labs on tight budgets. Having been in a lab for six years gives me a better chance of directing them and their experiments to something useful.

I have a huge number of fond memories.

It was a small group and very friendly and collaborative, everyone trying to help everyone else to do as well as they could. Beverley made it a good lab, and interesting projects attract good people and funding.

PhD student and postdoc 2000–2007

Dr Elinor Thompson

Dr Kit Wilkins

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Extracurricular

Reading List Robin Franklin

CAMCard discount at Heffers The Heffers’ Cambridge alumni discount is 15%. Shop in person with your CAMCard at Trinity Street or online at: alumni.cam.ac.uk/benefits/ camcard/bookshops.

Interview Anne Wollenberg Marcus Ginns

Robin Franklin is Professor of Stem Cell Medicine on the Biomedical Campus

“If you get Darwinism then you get how biology works,” says Professor Robin Franklin. Ever Since Darwin, a book of collected essays by Stephen Jay Gould, didn’t just introduce him to the concept of Darwinism – it also marked the point at which he truly became a biologist. He spent a lot of time in bookshops as a teenager and in 1979 or 1980, when he was 17 and in the sixth form, Ever Since Darwin caught his eye. “It converted me from a naturalist to a biologist.”

Franklin grew up in a family that loved literature. “There were always books in the house and my older brother and sister read avidly.” In contrast, he remembers himself as a Gerald Durrell-like character who had a fascination with the natural world. “While my sister was reading the Russian greats and my brother was working his way through La Comédie Humaine, I was glued to The Observer’s Book of Birds or the Reader’s Digest AA Book of British Birds.”

He was fascinated by the mindboggling diversity of the natural world.

“Darwinism gives us a coherence to make sense of it all. There’s a wonderful example in the book of a freshwater mussel with a protuberance outside its shell that resembles a swimming fish.

Darwinism can account for the emergence of extraordinary phenomena such as this.”

But the book’s real influence lay in the fact that it marked Franklin’s first foray into reading about serious biology – it explored overarching concepts and theories, in contrast to field guides about species and habitats that simply presented facts. “It’s written in a wonderful literary style, yet the content is very scholarly,” he remembers.

“Its discussion about theories of biology has been very influential in the way I now think about what I do on a daily basis. It’s also a very literary read that demonstrates the ability to write about science and engage in a scholarly way with the nature of biology as well as the facts.”

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Politics was a frequent topic of conversation in Franklin’s childhood home. “Biology is very much influenced by political positions and there are numerous interpretations of biology, particularly around human intelligence”

The book is essentially about Darwinism. “The principles and core themes in these essays are such profound, fundamental tenets of our discipline that they have stayed with me ever since,” says Franklin. “The concept of Darwinism is an overarching way of understanding how biology works, whatever branch you’re involved in. It’s extremely useful in knowing what’s likely to be true and what isn’t.”

Extracurricular

Cambridge Soundtrack Allan Clayton Interview Richard Wigmore Jack Liebeck

He was also struck by Gould’s political position and his arguments against biological determinism. Alongside literature, politics was a frequent topic of conversation in Franklin’s childhood home, with much discussion about left-wing politics. “Stephen Jay Gould’s work is the biology of the left, rather than the politics of the left,” he says. “Biology is very much influenced by political positions and there are numerous interpretations of biology, particularly around human intelligence.”

Ever Since Darwin reflected the stage the evolutionary biology debate was at in the late 1970s. “There has been a great burgeoning of really excellent popular science books, and Gould is something of a pioneer of that genre,” says Franklin.

He says he appreciates Gould’s debunking of biological determinist theories, both in Ever Since Darwin and subsequent works such as The Mismeasure of Man. The latter refutes the work of American anthropologist Samuel Morton, who used bogus measurements of the human cranium to make spurious claims about the racial basis of intelligence.

One of the crusades Gould took on was to argue against the American scientist EO Wilson, who believed in an absolute biological basis for human behaviour. “Gould’s counter-hypothesis was biological potentiality: the idea that humans have a whole diversity of different ways of behaving and conducting themselves, which are tailored by the environment,” says Franklin.

In his view, this is a much more plausible way of thinking about human behaviour. It also has very close parallels with his current research. Franklin is Professor of Stem Cell Medicine at Cambridge, where his work is concerned with adult stem cells and central nervous system regeneration. He is Head of Translational Science at the Wellcome Trust/Medical Research Council Cambridge Stem Cell Institute and is also director of the MS Society Cambridge Centre for Myelin Repair.

“There are so many parallels between Stephen Jay Gould’s work and what I do in my work now,” he says. “Stem cells are similar in the sense that they have a whole diversity of possible things they can become, and the environment determines which of those possibilities the cells proceed along.”

More than three decades have passed since Franklin read Ever Since Darwin, but its influence is evident in his thinking every day. “It certainly did its work when I was a boy. When you’re in your late teens, it’s a very impressionable time. Some of the core overarching concepts and themes embedded at that age will become the bedrock of all your subsequent thinking.”

Allan Clayton, tenor (St John’s 2000)

Walton: The Twelve We recorded Walton’s anthem at the end of my first year. It was thrilling, and sums up everything we did under Christopher Robinson’s inspirational direction. There was such youthful vitality to the choir’s singing. The Twelve, which describes the persecution of the disciples and the spreading of the gospel, is unashamedly brash. Parts of it I’d describe as agricultural, but there are also beautiful passages for the trebles, and a wonderful baritone solo at the beginning. I vividly remember 40 singers giving their all for Christopher Robinson at the climax.

Billy Joel: And So It Goes When I went up to Cambridge I managed to pilfer a copy of the King’s Singers arrangement of this Billy Joel ballad.

We then did it with the Gentlemen of St John’s and recorded it in a CD of closeharmony numbers called Gently Does It. The Gentlemen had a separate, fun, life from the St John’s choir, singing at May balls and the annual college garden party.

The group symbolised the post-exam, alcohol-fuelled summer wind-down. But the musicianship was astonishing.

Schubert: Winterreise Unlike a lot of my peers, I didn’t listen to lieder in my teens. To show me what I was missing, my friend, the baritone Ronan Collett, ran off some recordings, including Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Winterreise. His total understanding of Schubert’s desolate journey was a revelation. How had I reached the age of 19 without knowing this music? For me Fischer-Dieskau was the perfect lieder singer. His voice was so focused and unforced, and he had the gift of colouring the text without it bulging out of the line.

Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes This was one of those events you think really shouldn’t be happening. I couldn’t believe my luck in my final year, having

the chance to sing the part of Grimes with friends. While preparing it I went to see Philip Langridge, one of the role’s greatest interpreters. Langridge saw Grimes more as victim than villain, and said if he ever directed the opera he’d have every man on stage with an apprentice – that was the norm in the 18th century. Before each show I had to sing evensong, wearing my fisherman’s jumper under my cassock. I’d burnt holes in the jumper with paraffin, and once nearly passed out!

George Benjamin: ‘Twas in the Year that King Uzziah Died This is a bit of a left-field choice. George Benjamin, whose opera Written on Skin I’ve been performing recently, wrote it for a King’s carol concert, but refused to have it published. He found it naïve, even embarrassing. Christopher Robinson had to get special permission from George to perform it with the John’s choir. It starts with an unaccompanied tenor solo, and then there’s a big climax in the middle, with a held high A sharp. I didn’t think I could do it. But I took it to my teacher David Lowe, and it clicked – a vocal epiphany. The carol is slightly cheesy, perhaps. But it’s still George’s distinctive voice.

CAM 71 45

Extracurricular

A sporting life Archery Words Becky Allen Photograph Marcus Ginns

I

“

t’s not a glamorous place,” Cambridge University Bowman Jack Atkinson warns when we meet at the indoor shooting range. And he’s not wrong: it’s about as far from Agincourt or Sherwood Forest as you can imagine.

Behind a graffitied steel door in the foundations of Elizabeth Way bridge, the air smells of stagnant water and chemical toilets. Lit by fluorescent tubes, the concrete void is hung with cobwebs, but it’s surprisingly quiet. Rather than roaring overhead, the traffic on the road above makes a subdued sliding sound.

“When you’re shooting you have to focus, so you lose the background noise, the cars over the bridge,” Atkinson says, assembling his bow. “To shoot well you have to stand up quite straight, expand out, stand to your full height. Sometimes when I come back here I find myself inadvertently crouching because of the low ceiling, but you get used to it.”

Atkinson, a third year engineering student at Peterhouse and Tournaments Officer for Cambridge University Bowmen, says the club attracts more than its fair share of scientists: “There’s a running joke

that when we get new members we ask what science subject they’re doing. We get mainly medics, physical scientists and engineers, although we do have a couple of historians.”

With between 70 and 80 members, the Bowmen society – like archery in general – is thriving, boosted perhaps

by Hollywood’s love of the bow and arrow. “The big one a while ago was The Lord of the Rings, and perhaps we’ll see some resurgence with The Hobbit. More recently, The Avengers and Robin Hood – the Russell Crowe one – helped attract more boys to the sport, and the big one that’s brought girls to archery was The Hunger Games,” he says. “They all feature impossible or silly trick shots, and various gadgets, but if they help inspire people to look for an archery club and come into the sport that’s fantastic.”

Atkinson himself was inspired to take up archery 10 years ago, when he quit swimming in search of a more social but still competitive sport. And as an engineer, the science behind the sport interests him.

“It’s very technical when you think about it. It’s about projectile motion, energy conversion, and the bows shot in the university leagues are quite technical, it’s not just a piece of wood any more, there are dampers and stabilisers,” he explains, sliding six aluminium arrows into a quiver.

His bow, a recurve (so called because its tips curve away from the archer), is carbon fibre with a wooden core. “It’s personal preference, but wood is a lot nicer. People say it’s a sweeter shoot, but there’s a lot more variation in it.”

Together with a strong back, repeatability is crucial in archery. “You find when you’re shooting the string will come back and it’ll touch at least your chin but often your nose, perhaps your lips or the side of your face, and it’s after shooting for a long time that you get used to it. Then without thinking about it, you naturally bring it to the same place again and again, and that helps with your consistency,” Atkinson says. “One main focus of training is making these actions part of the subconscious, so that I do exactly the same thing every time without thinking.”

As he shoots his first six aluminium arrows at the golden centre of the target 20 yards away, Atkinson is a picture of mental and physical control. The arrows hit with a powerful thud, but Atkinson says too many are wide of the mark. “I have a tendency to overthink what I’m doing in competitions because of the pressure, so I’ve been advised to listen to music and then just go and shoot,” he admits.

“Maybe a bit of Taylor Swift or perhaps some classical piano. I like Springsteen, but a lot of his stuff may be a bit too energetic.” cub.soc.srcf.net

CAM 71 47

Extracurricular Lost work following road up Core processors last month installed in Commonwealth Member of a Jewish fraternity Office by Siemens accumulating six points?

Nuclear reactor in southern Opportunity for northerners on Germany pierced and plugged one occasion given by chief A special method covering Irish William’s ducks irritated by sun flying display Crowd by Schadenfreude Second rule ignored by first Extremely despicable person’s early arrival out of line Gaelic men are taken in by Gross Australian native’s absent elected politician Engineers backing into US city’s Deer raised by Liberal, once a make-shift fortifications nobleman Poet’s eye observed not to open Seaman wearing some French Untended island owned by king boots banished from European country Deceivers narrate short stories Any remainder missing above?

Laughter disguised in a cry Starving glutton about ninety at English short story writer home absorbing dead poet’s work Normandy’s first cardinal Remove the restraint from one facing regressive communist German following poor run subordinate Farm worker keeping mum active More than one sore old Share cropper’s final deed lacks swindler’s left out compliance Section provided for Jock’s rod Money withdrawn from field of Mary’s burning coal study in academy - these’ll help Cut old rule of descent the teachers Somewhere to eat heading for Architectural ornamentation as the desert seen in baroque gate The setter greatly impressed Poet’s grotto right next to square retiring housemaids column There’s no end of discomfort in Terminate tense blazoner’s bond dog’s troubles French writer climbing a tree Phrase: A creditor holding for Sam Dry poachers turned up at Phrase: ____________________________ perhaps regular intervals All entries to be received by 9 May 2014 Loosely few beat with a stick Twin once early Send completed crosswords: When the clue answers have been entered in the grid there will be two blank each entries andof an additional Preserve length Some Roman is indiscreet if not •eleven by post to CAM 71 Prize Crossword, University of Cambridge, blank cells. Solvers must complete the grid and write the thematic 2-word phrase beneath it. in Rome transparent membrane 1 Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge, CB5 8AB Names spelt out by the corrections to single letter misprints in the definition ofher 19 sudden clues exemplify Morag’s parts to cure fit •the byphrase. email toClues cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk are presented in conventional order (acrosses then downs) and the final grid consists Athletic fellow stops to look after • or enter online at alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam only of real words. a container for Jock?

The first correct entry drawn will receive a copy of Reds, Whites Solution to CAM 70 Crossword CoreVarsity processors month installed in Commonwealth Office by Siemens and Blues: last 60 Years Family by Schadenfreude (solution) Family

by Schadenfreude Nuclear reactor southern Germany pierced and plugged of the Oxford andinCambridge Blind Wine-tasting Competition A special method covering Irish flying display The ten family members 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B S T A I N S S W E E L are highlighted in (Anova, £35).

The competition Extremely despicable person's out of line was founded

by Harry Waugh Gross Australian native's absent G R A S S H O P P E R Y A the grid in blue, with 10 11 12 in 1953 andbacking is the oldest Engineers into contest US city's make-shift fortifications N A R R A S S B A R R E D WARBLER appearing in the isolated cells.

13 14 of its kind.

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Twoninety runners Starving glutton about at home CHIFFCHAFF, YELLOW up will also receive £35 to spend W M A K R O B E L D E E R BROWED. Entries Normandy's first cardinal facing regressive communist subordinate 22 23 24 25 on CUP publications.

O B R I E N U N L A D E D containing changed More than one sore old swindler's left out 26 27 28 29 30 Section for Jock's O A S T E A S T O O G R E letters (shown in red) Solutionsprovided and winners will be rod printed in CAM 72 and posted are 17a ARED, 31 32 33 34 Mary'satburning coal online alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam on 16 May 2014.

D Z H A D L H E W N E T N 23a ENLACED, 27a 35 36 Cut old rule of descent L O O S E S U D E N N E T CAST, 6d SLAM, 7d Somewhere to eat heading for the desert 37 E L W I N D L E S T R A E ERGS, 25d, DEBTED, INSTRUCTIONS The setter greatly impressed retiring housemaids 30d GENRE, 31d 38 S A S S E D A R T F O R D COWS. Yellow-browed There's no end of discomfort in dog's troubles by the corrections to single When the clue answers have and bush warblers are A creditor for Sam The ten family members are highlighted in the grid in blue, with WARBLER appearing in Winner: Richard Chamberlain letter misprints in the definition been enteredholding in the grid thereperhaps given in OED. the isolated cells.

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$

CAM 71 Prize Crossword

Crowd

by Schadenfreude

48 CAM 71

CAM 71 49

50 CAM 71