Cambridge University Buildings, Galleries, and Afternoon Tea

Continued from Part 3…

After the Fitzwilliam Museum, we continued along Trumpington Street North towards the college buildings. There were cyclists everywhere, very few of whom obeyed the rules of the road (stopping at traffic lights, riding on the left, not riding on the pavement etc.), but this didn’t detract much from us admiring the amazing architecture on every corner.

Not much to write about for each building along Trumpington Street, we just had an hour of architectural admiration.

Saint Botolph’s Church.

Saint Catharine’s College.

King’s College.

The Old Schools and Senate House.

The interior of Great Saint Mary’s Church, which sits opposite The Old Schools. This was one of the busiest Churches we’ve been in, in terms of tourists taking photos.

Trinity College Great Gate.

Saint John’s College Great Gate and grounds.

In the middle of this, we took a quick break from looking up at buildings to step in to the Cambridge Contemporary Art Gallery for a look at some sculptures and prints. There were some painted and sand-blasted curved glass ornaments by an artist called Verity Pulford that I immediately loved, so much so I had to pick up a couple of them to display on a windowsill at home. Here’s a picture of them on display in our lounge:

The lady running the Gallery recommended we check out Kettle’s Yard, a renowned contemporary art gallery not far away, so after we’d seen Saint John’s College, we took a left, crossed the river, and checked it out. It was around this time we realised that contemporary art wasn’t really our thing, since two very large galleries (each about 20 square metres) had just a single statue inside, that wasn’t particularly impressive. The “artist” was Antony Gormley, the picture below is of his piece “Edge III”, which is meant to give you an uncertainty of the stability of the world. All I felt when I looked at it was disappointment, and not a single person we saw in there spent more than 3 seconds looking at it, obviously we don’t understand contemporary art. Give me an ancient roman marble statue any day over something like this! The River Cam was again nice and busy though, so we got to see that on our way up which was nice.

Just next door to Kettle’s Yard was the Museum of Cambridge, which was much more interesting to us. A 17th century timber-framed former inn that had been repaired and stocked full of hundreds of exhibits from the 17th and 18th (and more I think) centuries. The building was split in to different rooms, such as the Bar, the Kitchen, the Dining Parlour, and so on, each of which having themed exhibitions fit for the room.

This museum was great, much more interesting than the exhibition at Kettle’s Yard. Once we were done here, we headed to our afternoon tea reservation. Just around the corner was The Varsity Hotel and Spa, including a bar on the 6th floor, aptly named SIX, where I’d booked us in for some nice afternoon tea. Unknown to Helen, I’d also invited her best friend Claire and fiance Dan to join us as a surprise. The view from this 6th floor bar looked over all of Cambridge, we towered above all of the colleges we’d just walked by, giving us some great views while we tucked in to our scones. This is the view out of the other side of the bar, looking over Jesus Green, another park in the city centre.

Afternoon tea was amazing, as was catching up with Claire and Dan. We chatted for the better part of three hours, and were eventually asked to vacate our seats for the next group. The pair also gave us a little glass bowl ornament that conveniently goes very nicely with the two ornaments I’d bought a couple of hours prior, it can be seen in the middle of our windowsill in one of the previous pictures.

We walked through Cambridge a little more, but by this time everywhere was closing down for the evening, so there wasn’t much more for us to do. We stepped in to another gallery called Artique Galleries for a browse, there was one painting I particularly liked called “Take Only What You Need From Me” by artist Tood White, but he only does limited edition prints which were way out of my price range unfortunately. They let me take a photo of it though.

So we headed back to the hotel room, exhausted once again from a busy day. On the way we walked past Saint Andrew’s Street Baptist Church which was very interesting to look at, then walked across Parker’s Piece, another big green area in the middle of the city, full of people still enjoying the sunshine!

We decided we didn’t need much of a dinner since we were full of scones and cakes, so opted for just a little snack at the Frankie and Benny’s just round the corner from the hotel. The food was great, but our waitress accidentally put the wrong thing through the terminal so we ended up with an extra big milkshake for free! A nice surprise for sure, but far too much food for one day!

On the Monday, we decided we’d done enough sight-seeing for the weekend, and headed straight home after breakfast. A great weekend overall, we enjoyed pretty much every place we visited, and the weather was outstanding the whole time we were away! We’d definitely come back again!