THE KITE ‘redevelopment’ was one of the worst things ever to happen to Cambridge, ranking equal to, or above, the destruction/vulgarisation of the once immensely characterful Petty Cury and the razing of nearly the whole of one side of an exquisitely eccentric King Street.
The tangled web of old streets that formed the basis of The Kite – sandwiched between East Road and Newmarket Road – was heart-warming, reassuringly human (in spirit and in scale) and endlessly fascinating, in the way that the best townscapes are.
Over many months in the late 1970s and early 1980s, homes, pubs, crafts workshops, shops big and small and cafés – including the inimitable open-all-hours Waffles – were reduced to rubble by rampaging bulldozers and swinging balls of steel. Virtually an entire community was wiped out.
Supplanted they were by the soul-chilling, anywhereville monstrosity known as the Grafton Centre. (You can be sure, incidentally, that most places with ‘centre’ as part of their name will be dreadful.)
The struggle to save The Kite went back 30 years. In 1950, the Holford Report had opined that Cambridge’s historic heart could not be expected to meet the shopping “needs” of future generations. “We regard Fitzroy Street as… a valuable relief for shopping pressure on the older centre,” it said, with a tunnelised materialist eye.
Vast opposition to the destruction finally succumbed to the powerful alliance of a Tory-controlled city council and Grosvenor Estates Commercial Development.
Forty years later, and we can celebrate a survivor of The Kite débacle – The Free Press, in Prospect Row, behind Warkworth Terrace, close to Parker’s Piece, one of Cambridge’s loveliest pubs, identified by CAMRA as having a regionally important historic pub interior.
It survives too the Covid catastrophe, and is currently fully open for business, which includes the serving of wonderful Greene King beers and top-quality food. But The Free Press, and other watering-holes, really need our enthusiastic support as part of a determined stand against a pandemic that threatens not only our health and economies but our culture and social well-being
Hope to see you there.
Footnote: don’t get me wrong. King Street’s charms survive, just in a diluted form. (I mean, how could any self-respecting planner sanction replacement of an interesting curved streetscape – as are the charming, variegated buildings on the other side of the road – with brutalist structures in a straight line? Apparently, quite easily.)
Bronterre News 