Reading light The waters are rising Playfulness Concrete

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 Cambridge12
Debate18
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
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00
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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
24
Kathleen Richardson argues that digital
technology is shifting the focus away from our
physical lives towards a virtual existence.
Reading light
28
Ensuring bookworms have sufficient light
to read by has obsessed the creators of libraries since
the 16th century says Dr James Campbell.
Advertising enquiries
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20
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.
CAM 71 1
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)
2 CAM 71
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:
[email protected]
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!
classics.cam.ac.uk
CAM 71 3
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.
4 CAM 71
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
[email protected].
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.
S
N
e
e
N
S
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.
CAM 71 5
6 CAM 71
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: [email protected]
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
[email protected]
8 CAM 71
DIARY
LENT TERM
Alumni events:
E: [email protected]
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.
10 CAM 71
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.
CAM 71 11
SECRET CAMBRIDGE: TRINITY TAP
drinker’s
delight
Words Becky Allen
Photographs Marcus Ginns
W
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.
CAM 71 13
14 CAM 71
T
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.
Images Forlane 6 Studio
CAM 71 15
O
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.”
CAM 71 17
One eighth of the global
population remains
undernourished – but the
problem is rarely a lack of food,
says Stella Nordhagen.
W
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
DEBATE
Harvest
for the world
Illustration Lara Harwood
18 CAM 71
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.
CAM 71 19
H
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
20 CAM 71
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
CAM 71 23
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.
24 CAM 71
I
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.
Photographs Peter Funch
CAM 71 25
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.
CAM 71 27
28 CAM 71
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
T
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.
CAM 71 29
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.
30 CAM 71
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.
CAM 71 31
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.
CAM 71 33
34 CAM 71
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.
CAM 71 37
Jill Calder
University matters
My Cambridge
Reading list
Cambridge soundtrack A sporting life
Prize crossword
41
42
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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
CAM 71 41
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
42 CAM 71
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
CAM 71 43
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.”
44 CAM 71
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
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Names spelt out by the corrections to single letter misprints in the definition
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clues exemplify
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to cure
fit
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byphrase.
email toClues
[email protected]
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.
The book features
Poet's
eye observed
not to open
A G G F L E E R M E S L O Extra letters in clues
interviews
contributions
15 16
17
18
Untended and
island
owned by from
king banished from European country
I C O N T A R E W S K E G spell out BLACKCAP,
former
contestants,
judgesabove?
and
Any remainder
missing
19
20
21
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A M A I S M S I E S T A WHITETHROAT,
college
wine
buyers.
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.
Extra
letters
in
clues
spell
out
BLACKCAP,
WHITETHROAT,
(Corpus Christi 1977)
parts of 19 clues exemplify the
will be two blank entries
CHIFFCHAFF,
YELLOW
BROWED.
Entries
containing
changed letters (shown in red)
Runners
up:
Teyrnon
Powell
(Caius
1968)
phrase. Clues are presented in
and an additional eleven
are
ARED,
23a ENLACED,
27a CAST,
and17a
Alison
Bangham
(Newnham
1945)6d SLAM, 7d ERGS, 25d, DEBTED, 30d
conventional order (acrosses
blank cells. Solvers must
GENRE, 31d COWS. Yellow-browed and bush warblers are given in OED.
Special mention: spouse solvers Hugh and Barbara
then downs) and the final grid
complete the grid and write
Wiltshire
(Jesus
andwas
Newham
1966) and Tim and
Shading and
colouring
not required.
consists only of real words.
the thematic 2-word phrase
Avril Pedley (Trinity 1960 and Newnham 1962).
beneath it. Names spelt out
$
CAM 71 Prize Crossword
Crowd
by Schadenfreude
48 CAM 71
CAM 71 49
50 CAM 71