The Cambridge Backs Self-Guided Tour via Vidi Guides

I don’t often do audio tours when I’m travelling, I suppose because I always have a rough plan of what I want to see on any particular day and between that I enjoy wandering around the area following whatever route strikes my interest. On this occasion I had no real plan for the day I arrived in Cambridge and Booking.com was offering me a deal on this particular audio tour so after checking in at my hotel I headed out to explore the Cambridge Backs.

The Backs refers to the area of central Cambridge where many of Cambridge’s most famous university buildings back on to the River Cam. The tour starts by the River at Scudamore’s Quayside and is presented by PhD student and historians Katie and Josh presenting some interesting and quirky facts about the area.

The tour roughly follows the River Cam and starts by discussing the history of punting which is a famous part of Camrbdige life, as it is in Oxford. Here members of the public can take trips but all the colleges have their own boats that students can also take out. I didn’t partake in any punting tours myself, but saw plenty of people who did.

The first important step was to look at the Mathematical Bridge. This is a wooden footbridge that according to legend was built by Isaac Newton without the use of nuts or bolts, just by using his principles of gravity. In reality the bridge was built 22 years after Newton had died and was designed by William Etheridge and using a tangent and radial bussing – basically a way of arranging the beams so pressure is distributed evenly throughout and yes, with the aid of nuts and bolts.

You then head around the back of Queen’s College and through this green open space of the Backs to probably one of the most famous of Cambridge’s views, that of King’s College Chapel. This land which was originally gifted by founders of the colleges would have been used to graze animals and in the summer cows do still roam around here.

One crazy story about the chapel is that of a student climbing up one of those spires to add a traffic cone to the top of one tower. The college responded by having scaffolders to create scaffolds to reach it but they only managed to get half way in a day. Meanwhile the student returned at night to move the cone to the other tower; other items students have hung from the towers include toilet seats and santa hats!

The route then goes over Garret Hostel Bridge and ends by Trinity College having gone into some interesting details about gender equality at the university and some of the pranks students sometimes pull on tourists. From here you can make your way to walk around the outside of some of the colleges. (Some of the colleges offer tours, some have a small photo taking area at their entrances which varies depending on the college and whether or not exams are happening – I didn’t do any of the tours but took plenty of photos from the outside which will feature in a later post). This was my first time using a Vedi self-guided tour and I liked it well enough to keep it in mind for future use.