Chris Elliott: ‘I hadn’t been in Cambridge for several months and I was shocked by what I found’

I’ve lived and worked in the Cambridge area for four decades or so, and for the first time, I feel deeply ashamed of the city I have grown to love, and anxious about its future.

My younger brother had come down from the North East to visit me, and we decided to drive into Cambridge and spend an afternoon wandering around its lovely central streets while we caught up with what has been happening in our lives. It’s not often that we're able to meet up, so the rendezvous was something we’d both been really looking forward to.

I parked my car in The Grafton West car park, and we set off, first into The Grafton itself.

I hadn’t been in there for several months, and I have to say, I was shocked by what I found. A very large number of shop units – it seemed roughly half of them – were empty, the businesses that once traded there were gone, the darkened interiors and iron security grilles conspiring to create a ghost town atmosphere among the remaining retailers still gamely soldiering on.

It was a Wednesday afternoon, just before lunchtime, but there were relatively few shoppers to be seen, and frankly, having told my brother the retail centre had been refurbished not that long ago, I was disappointed and embarrassed by the now sorry state of it. Back in the 1980s, as a journalist, I had been there on the day it opened, and watched as cheering crowds massed in Fitzroy Street and Burleigh Street, eager to get a glimpse of the Queen, who had come to cut the ribbon. It was the culmination of a long and tortuous planning wrangle, where buildings in the Kite area had been razed to make way for what the city council believed would be a retail shot in the arm for the local economy.

I know there are plans for another ‘major redevelopment’, with The Grafton being partly demolished to make way for new life science laboratories as well as a hotel and gym. I know most of us are buying most of our stuff online, and shops are struggling to keep bricks-and-mortar emporia afloat. But it’s still very sad to see, isn’t it? On the day The Grafton opened, thousands of people gathered and there was a communal thrill – a buzz of excitement, and optimism – about the future. Will we have the same excitement and optimism when the new labs, hotel and gym rise from The Grafton ashes?

My brother and I left there quickly and walked to the city centre, pausing for a coffee en route. The central area was much busier, long troupes of tourists and language school students thronging the streets, ogling the colleges, some falling prey to the blandishments of punt touts – scenes we have all witnessed so many times over the years.

We made our way through the market square and my brother saw a notice urging us to climb the stairs of Great St Mary’s and get a bird’s eye view. But the cost of a ticket, £7, was a tad expensive, so we moved on. On down King’s Parade, past the ugly steel gates installed across the road to bar traffic, and to the entrance to King’s College, one of the richest such institutions in the world. Maybe a peek inside there, to admire the vaulted ceiling of the chapel? The price of admission, we were told, was £16 a head. Rather a shock. Should we? No, my brother said he’d seen the inside of the chapel many years ago, and he didn’t think it was worth us splashing out more than 30 quid between us for a second look.

We had lunch and a beer in The Mill pub, popped into the Fitzwilliam Museum (thankfully still free admission) and then made our way back to The Grafton car park. Since I’d bought lunch, my brother insisted he would pay for the parking ticket, and I warned him it might be a tenner or so, since we’d been away three or four hours. He slipped the ticket into the payment machine, and we both stood stunned as the due amount lit up on the screen – we’d just clocked up five hours’ stay, it turned out, and we owed the city council £27.60.

As we all know, parking charges have been steadily rising in Cambridge for many years. Back in the early 1980s, leaving your car in that car park for five hours would set you back £1.60. Forty years on, the fee for temporarily occupying a 2m by 5m concrete space has risen inexorably to 16 times as much.

I felt, as I indicated at the beginning of this piece, ashamed, deeply ashamed, as my brother, like me a pensioner, inserted his payment card and coughed up. Where he comes from, a city six times the size of Cambridge, the cost of parking in a multi-storey all day is about £8.

Disgust and anger also rose up in me. For many years, the city council, which has the good fortune to manage all 10 principal Cambridge car parks, has been unashamedly raking in millions each year from people coming in by car. In the parking section of the council’s website, the latest increases in charges, which came into effect in April, are laid out in gleefully edacious ranks, the Guildhall mandarins justifying them by stating that the high tariffs are meant ‘to encourage using public transport, cycling or walking’, as well as ‘to encourage visiting at less busy periods of the day’.

Just as car park charges have soared, so has the cost of on-street parking, administered by Cambridgeshire County Council. A four-hour parking sojourn in Queen’s Road, for example, should you wish to wander by the colleges along the Backs, will now prompt a ker-ching of £19.20 in the New Shire Hall coffers.

So, having waved my brother off on his train back up north, I’m sitting here at my keyboard in the hope that the authorities which control parking in Cambridge will accept a challenge – and answer what I believe are a few pertinent questions about the future of the city we all love.

Is road traffic in Cambridge, once so congested, really still so bad that drivers are still personae non grata, who need to be thumped in their wallets to discourage them from coming in by car?

Are the sky-high parking charges really about encouraging the use of Park and Ride, cycling and walking? Or are they actually just about swelling the council’s bank account?

What are the councils doing about Cambridge’s retail scene? Why should people pay through the nose to park near a shopping centre where half the shops are empty, or in a city in danger of becoming a lifeless no-go zone, where only the already wealthy colleges continue to prosper?

Are we going to see more money-pit projects like the Greater Cambridge Partnership-led Milton Road scheme, which is soaking up £24million in public funding ‘to improve bus, walking and cycling experiences along this key route and to free up the road for people who need to drive’? When it’s finally finished, more than two years since the mechanical diggers first began uprooting pavements and just about everything else, will it have been worth it? My brother and I could, as the council would like, have used Park and Rride to come in to the city – but the last time I tried that, it took nearly an hour for the bus to negotiate the seemingly endless roadworks.

To me, Cambridge is in pretty bad shape, and I don’t see much about it that inspires hope for the years ahead.

What IS the future of Cambridge? Is it destined to become one huge, sprawling high-tech laboratory, filled with half-empty office blocks, and surrounded by drab, unimaginative housing developments; will its shopping streets become home to more gyms, more hotels, and fewer independent traders, fewer places of entertainment and culture, fewer good pubs and other places to eat and drink? Will the colleges and river become merely a museum geared not to education, but mainly to milking visitors of as much money as possible? A city where the price of everything – parking, housing, even getting a brief peek inside a college quadrangle – just keeps on going up and up?

I don’t mind if I’m accused of being a miserable, cantankerous old curmudgeon, who is seeing more negatives than positives – and it’s certainly true that yes, having come to Cambridge in my 30s, I am now no spring chicken, and yes, I’m susceptible to ‘cant and rancour’. As one grows older, the fresh-faced optimism of younger days generally gives way to a gloomier perspective.

But I would like to hear from the powers-that-be, the people with a handle on where Cambridge is going in the 21st century, and into the 22nd. Perhaps someone from Cambridge City Council, from Cambridgeshire County Council, from the GCP, maybe even from Cambridge University or the bigger colleges, might feel able to respond to my questions here?

As readers, tell me, and everyone who reads the Cambridge Independent, in simple terms, whether I’m simply being a grumpy old git who wants to vent about his poor brother having to shell out £27.60 for parking the car – or whether some of what I’m saying chimes.

And to the powers-that-be, if there is a bright future for Cambridge, do me, and all those who live in and around Cambridge and who care about the place, the honour of telling me what it is.