ADVERT I SEMENT F EATURE
THROUGH THE KEYHOLE
Sam Cooke, partner at Cooke Curtis & Co, looks around interesting homes in Cambridge. Up this issue, number 30, Trumpington High Street BAGS OF CHARACTER
here are bits of the centre of Cambridge that have changed very little over the last few hundred years. Mainly the fancy educational
bits in the middle, but in terms of housing, there’s actually not an awful lot that’s much older than Victorian. It’s therefore fairly slim pickings for those who want to live in something an estate agent might weakly call a ‘character property’. Journey a few miles out to the villages around the city, or across to nearby towns like Bury St Edmunds, and you can’t help but trip over magnificent timbered buildings that have stood proudly for 500 years. But, like most of our cities, Cambridge is far less lucky. There are, however, little pockets of surviving ancient houses. One of which is a short run of three along Trumpington High Street, just down from the offices of Cooke Curtis & Co, opposite The Green Man pub, which itself is thought to be 15th century. Two thatched houses and one with a tiled roof, number 30, have escaped the constant churn of modernisation and redevelopment that has changed the rest of the street. Number 30 was built in the 1600s and has stood quietly by as the history of our city has been written around it. Such luminaries as Newton, Wordsworth, Darwin and Clean Bandit have come and gone as 30 High Street has watched on. The house is, of course, not wholly unchanged since it was built, but it is remarkable how well preserved it is and how similarly it is lived in to how it was back then. The current occupants still warm themselves around a wood fire in the same central inglenook fireplace and under the same wooden beams that 500 years of predecessors have. As we have grown taller over the years, the floors have been lowered so heads are not bumped and the original treads of one of the two staircases are now awkwardly short – a reminder of how much bigger feet must be now compared to then. Indoor bathrooms and a modern kitchen have been added, but the house works like it always has: keeping people dry, warm and safe. Upstairs, the three bedrooms connect through to each other rather than feeding off a central landing – unusual by today’s standards, but not unusual enough that any of its recent owners
“There are little pockets of surviving ancient houses”
has seen fit to change it. Such idiosyncrasies that seem a challenge when considering a house often prove unproblematic in practice. Its cellar actually looks more appealing now than it might have done 50 years ago, somewhere to keep food cool and dry without the need to burn electricity feels like an idea you could easily find in the latest issue of an eco house building magazine. Its big garden is an idea that never gets old, while its garage has gone from unneeded, to luxury, through to essential and back to near superfluous as its current occupants’ car sits outside on charge. A social history in itself. Thankfully, we have now protected houses like 30 High Street from demolition by law and the hope is that it will last to tell its stories for another 500 years. It’s something of a romantic privilege to tread the wooden floorboards of a house this ancient. To own one is to be a custodian of its past and protector of its future.
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C A M B S E D I T I O N . C O . U K
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