Cambridge Audio Tour: Bedders, Bargees and Booksellers

Cambridge is famous as a university town. This walk is about the other Cambridge — the carriers who delivered the post, the watermen who poled coal up from King's Lynn, the binders who stitched the books, the women who lit the staircases at dawn, the brewers who tied the inns, the masons who cut the stone, the printers who set the type, and the market traders who fed the lot. From the working wharves of Quayside, through the bookbinders' alleys and gown-makers' shopfronts of Trinity Street and King's Parade, into the chapel that was Corpus's parish before Corpus had a chapel, past the only galleried coaching-inn yard left in town, across the open market that has traded continuously for a thousand years, past the gates where Thomas Hobson the carrier kept forty horses, to the world's oldest publishing house and finally to the Mill Pond where the Bishop's and King's Mills ground Cambridge's grain — a couple of miles, a couple of hours, and most of a working town hiding inside a famous one.