Book Description

This book, first published in 2000, draws on the great wealth of associations of street-names in Cambridge. It is not a dictionary, but it provides a series of entries on such topics as the Reformation, George IV and his wife, twentieth-century British scientists, businessmen, Elizabethan times, medieval Cambridge, mayors, millers, and builders. It includes hermits and coal merchants, field marshals and laundresses, martyrs and bombers, unscrupulous politicians and the founder of a Christian community, Cromwell and Newton, an Anglo-Saxon queen and the discoverer of Uranus - all people who lived in or often visited Cambridge. The ancient Stourbridge fair is included, along with castles and boat-races, sewage pumps and the original Hobson of 'Hobson's Choice'. Who was St Tibb? Where did Dick Turpin hide? Where was the medieval takeaway? Unlike earlier works, this is a history of everybody for everybody.