Cambridge: expanding a campus, growing a city

Sitting at the centre of Cambridge Biomedical Campus is Addenbrooke’s Hospital – an accumulation of low structures, many dating from the 1960s. It’s a leading teaching and research hospital, but not one of the great NHS megastructures. Some careful black-and-white photography of a concrete walkway might produce an evocative piece of nostalgia, but the main impression is of dirty portacabins, streaked concrete, a hidden entrance and confusing signage.

Fifteen minutes’ drive from Cambridge’s centre (when the city’s notorious traffic isn’t playing up), the Campus is the unexpected focus of the UK’s life-sciences sector – one of the few industries in which we still rank among the world leaders. Ringed around Addenbrooke’s, in rather more glamorous accommodation, is a series of world-leading research institutes that exist in beneficial synergy with the hospital and each other. Most notable is the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology – a Nobel Prize factory – but other esteemed institutes and education centres abound, many attached to the university, along with other NHS institutions including the Royal Papworth heart and lung hospital and the Rosie maternity hospital.

The Campus is spread over 28ha, worth an impressive £4.2billion a year to the UK economy, and supposedly supports one in every six jobs in the local authority areas. It was a pet project of Michael Gove, name-checked four times in this year’s spring budget. The associated Case for Cambridge plan – a vision to ‘unleash … Cambridge’s full economic potential’ as 'Europe’s largest technology cluster’ – included a £10 million investment in transport and development plans at the Campus. Its undeniable allure has been enhanced by new commercial arrivals, in particular Abcam and AstraZeneca, the latter in an impressive ‘Discovery Centre’ of faceted glass by Herzog & de Meuron, claimed as the UK’s largest R&D facility. Surrounded by chunky benches, winding paths and wild flowers, it has the ‘Californian university’ vibe that the Campus hopes will eventually replace the current weathered picnic benches elsewhere.

Phase two of the Campus – another 28ha – is under construction, with two further developer-led phases in the planning stages, and the ambitious intention of doubling the current total of 22,000 staff over the next 20 years. On the current site, both a Children’s Hospital and a Cancer Research Hospital are approved for construction as part of the New Hospital Programme, while a further plot, already owned by Addenbrooke’s, has been put aside for a planned rebuild. Given the review of the programme just announced by the Labour government, these projects are feeling decidedly shaky.

Locals (who tend to be informed, educated, and with a certain amount of time on their hands) are not entirely supportive of plans for the Campus. Cambridge was the country’s fastest growing city between 2011 and 2021. The proposal for the Campus and associated housing driving further into the Green Belt (some owned by the County Council) feels like another piecemeal step towards absorbing surrounding ‘necklace villages’ within conurbation – ‘Where will it end?’. There’s also a feeling that promises of increased healthcare provision in the Campus’s earlier ‘Vision 2020’ document have dwindled in the new ‘Vision 2050’. And appeals to residents’ finer natures with the prospect of life-saving vaccines as a ‘greater good’ are met with questions about the benefits of focusing Cambridge’s life sciences in this one location – there are around 30 science parks and hubs scattered around the city. In short, expanding the Campus may well benefit UK plc, but what’s in it for nearby communities is less clear – proposed fitness classes and street food don’t really cut the mustard.

All are agreed, however, that water, transport and accommodation are potential deal-breakers, curtailing expansion across the city, let alone the Campus. The first of these is swiftly becoming critical. Only a fortnight ago the City Council voted to acknowledge a ‘water crisis’, but investment and solutions are thin on the ground. A proposed new reservoir would be a start for a city currently relying on extraction – the latest consultation has just ended – but it would take a decade or more to realise. On transport, things are more hopeful. Cambridge South Station (in effect a private station for the Campus, on the provisional ‘southern route’ for east-west rail to Oxford) is nearing completion, while there are planned rail upgrades to feeder towns such as Ely or Newmarket. There’s also the potential of the controversial elongation of Cambridge’s guided busway (‘the longest in the world’) – the Cambridge Connect pressure group is staunchly campaigning for a light-rail alternative. But the city’s ageing road network remains unaddressed, with a ‘Greater Cambridge Transport Strategy’ at least a year away.

There is some consensus on the need for homes, including affordable housing. The Campus has to offer attractive lifestyles, whether to researchers relocating from Munich or to underpaid NHS staff – its own housing study in May found that 30% of employees were unable to afford open-market rents. The government’s Case for Cambridge set an ambitious goal of 150,000 new homes by 2050 (already reduced from 250,000), doubling the size of the unsuspecting city. In the plan, these are optimistically described as ‘terraced and semi-detached houses on the edge of Cambridge and mixed-use neighbourhoods with apartment buildings, offices, cafes and shops nearer the centre’, while ‘major new urban quarter opportunities’ are being sought. Two large brownfield expansion zones have already been earmarked in Cambridge’s existing plans – the old airport to the east, to accommodate 7,000 homes, and the older sewage works to the north, which promises 8,000 homes, but requires confirmation of a potential £277 million of government funding to relocate the works into the green belt near Horningsea.

With various award-winning developments over the last two decades – Stirling-Prize winner Accordia, and the recent Eddington and Marmalade Lane schemes – Cambridge, aided by its wealth, does have a good track record in ‘high density, high quality’, and in meeting affordable housing targets. And the targets are seen as feasible by the Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire Councils, together known as ‘Greater Cambridge’, who are collaborating on a new if distant local plan – the submission date has just been pushed back a year. Under Flora Samuel, head of architecture at Cambridge University, an independent Urban Room has also been established for Cambridge (an idea initiated by Terry Farrell), boosting participation in the planning process, and so far meeting with a warm response from developers, planners and residents.

Unfortunately, both Campus and city suffer from a very British lack of a coherence. Held together by a non-profit partnership, the Campus is a composite of NHS, commercial and university stakeholders. Its current and future sites are owned by multiple landowners – Cambridge colleges, the NHS trust, private bodies and the councils – with Prologis installed as the vigorous developer. There are multiple opinions about the status of masterplanning at the Campus – current local plan proposals merely request an updated one, but others are less polite. Competitors in the Germany and Singapore are certainly less fragmented, and also benefit from high-quality publicly-funded infrastructure. Perhaps it is the very chaos of British planning that allows the Campus to compete. 

Cambridge itself boasts an even more convoluted chain of command. As well as the two councils, and the various shared bodies that make up Greater Cambridge – sometimes involving the County Council and the directly elected Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough – the university and colleges remain powerful (and, in the latter case, many are rich in both cash and land). Influential local business and academic organisations such as Cambridge Ahead and Cambridge Innovate have strong voices, but the new kid on the block is the opaque Cambridge Delivery Group (under Argent’s co-founder Peter Freeman) announced in Case for Cambridge as a potential forerunner to a development corporation to ‘drive forward the government’s vision for Cambridge’. The plan’s foreword by Freeman states that ‘the level of growth proposed … will necessarily require an unprecedented level of funding’. No more has yet been made public.

In both instances it seems that, despite talent and dedication, there is no organisation with the responsibility, accountability, remit – and certainly resources – to deliver any overarching plan, pulling out the required nettles along the way. Nor is there any regional body with the clout to make this happen – at present, it requires central government to maintain interest and turn on the taps. With this flawed model, it feels unlikely that the transformation of a small provincial university town into a cohesive, thriving high-tech city can be realised as well as it should be. And there are certainly some who wish the attempt would not be made, with the money instead employed to improve transport infrastructure across the country, rather than placing all eggs in one tempting but small basket located an hour from King’s Cross. 

As I struggle to catch the correct bus back up to the station, a similarly uncertain German woman, fresh from a good experience at Addenbrooke’s, informs me that the centre of Cambridge is ‘grotty’, lacking in public space and amenities. It’s not a scientific survey, but it does suggest Cambridge’s scattered leadership should not be complacent about the city’s abiding attraction as a destination for tourists, talent, companies or even life sciences – that it’s not just the Campus that needs an updated masterplan. But who exactly is going to make that happen?