Things to do in Cambridge

Landmark · City centre, along the Cam

The lawns and bridges behind the older colleges, with the late-Gothic fan vault of King's Chapel at their centre.

Local tip: Evensong at King's is free, open to anyone, and sung most days in term. It is the best way to be inside that building without a ticket or a crowd — arrive twenty minutes early and join the queue at the north door.

Neighborhood · East of the railway station

A long, unpolished independent high street of Kurdish groceries, Portuguese bakeries, secondhand bookshops and small restaurants — the least university-shaped part of the city.

Local tip: Go east of the railway bridge into Romsey, where the shops get cheaper and better. The Mill Road Winter Fair in December is the one day the whole street closes and the entire city turns up.

Culture · Trumpington Street

A vast free museum of antiquities, painting and applied arts in a grand Victorian building — Egyptian coffins, Impressionists and Chinese jade in the same afternoon.

Local tip: Free, never crowded on a weekday, and the upper galleries are usually empty. The Kettle's Yard house across town is its quiet opposite — a modernist collection kept as a lived-in home, and better than the museum for an hour of calm.

Nature · South-west, along the Cam

Water meadows running from the city to the village of Grantchester, with wild swimming spots, cattle and an orchard tea garden at the end.

Local tip: Walk or punt out and eat in the Orchard Tea Garden under the apple trees, which has been serving since 1897. Do it on a weekday; on a summer Sunday the meadow path is a procession.

Nature · Off Trumpington Road, ten minutes from the centre

Forty acres of systematic beds, glasshouses, a limestone rock garden and a winter garden designed to be at its best in January.

Local tip: The winter garden is the point. Most people visit in June and miss the one garden in Britain built specifically so that a grey February afternoon is worth walking through.

Nature · Four miles south-east, on the busway and cycle routes

An Iron Age hillfort in beech woodland on the only high ground for miles, with views back across the whole of the flat country to the north.

Local tip: Cycle out via the Addenbrooke's road or Shelford. Almost every visitor to Cambridge assumes the landscape is uniformly flat and never discovers there is a chalk ridge with woods on it twenty minutes from the station.