Phil Rodgers: Tourists fill Cambridge’s streets once more – but do we really need the King’s Parade barrier?
Cambridge has had a fairly cool and damp summer so far, but this doesn’t seem to have deterred visitors to the city.
Tourist coaches are bumper to bumper on Queens Road, flotillas of punts are busy on the river, majestic herds of language students are sweeping through the city's streets, and King’s Parade is packed with sightseers wishing that King’s College Chapel didn’t have quite so much scaffolding on it. After the hammer-blow of the pandemic, Cambridge’s tourist industry seems to be recovering strongly - but what will the impact be on the city?
Before 2019, Cambridge visitor numbers were increasing steadily. The graph shows data from the International Passenger Survey.
This only captures a fraction of visits, because it just counts international travellers who spent at least one night in the city. However, it shows the steadily rising trend until Covid-19 brought tourism to a screeching halt, and the strong recovery last year. It’s a similar picture for total visitor numbers, which rose from 5.4 million in 2013 to over eight million a year just before the pandemic - roughly 55 for every Cambridge resident. While visitors make an important contribution to the city’s economy, they also have a big impact in the summer, particularly on the historic centre, and this will only get more intense if numbers go on rising.
Many people are surprised to learn that Cambridge no longer has a visitor information centre. It used to be located in the Guildhall, and was run by the city council for many years before being transferred to a separate company, Visit Cambridge & Beyond (VCB), in 2016.
The plan was that VCB would generate income from walking tours, but even before the pandemic it ran into financial difficulties, and in 2020 it went into liquidation with debts of nearly £200,000. Since then, a new Visit Cambridge organisation has risen from the ashes, this time run jointly by the city council, Fitzwilliam Museum Enterprises, King’s College, and the city centre business organisation Cambridge BID. However, the visitor information centre has stayed shut, and instead uniformed City Ambassadors engage with visitors on the streets.
The Visit Cambridge website says the ambassadors welcome around 60,000 visitors a year, but this compares with 350,000 face-to-face enquiries a year at the old visitor information centre, as well as half a million telephone calls or emails. It’s not surprising that some visitors are disappointed. One Tripadvisor review asks, “With so many tourists how can you close the information centre? Come on Cambridge you are a major tourist centre. What a complete let down for the city.”
The problem, of course, is funding - though it does seem strange that with visitors contributing up to £850m a year to the city’s economy, it isn’t possible to capture just a bit more of that money to run services for them. Many European cities have a tourist tax for this purpose, typically a few Euros charged on hotel rooms. However, there is currently no such scheme in the UK, and even if the government brought one in, nearly 90 per cent of Cambridge visitors don’t stay overnight and so wouldn’t pay the tax. If the much-debated congestion charge does happen, tourist coaches could have to pay £50 to enter the city, but this revenue would be ring-fenced for transport programmes, not tourism services.
The impact of tourism is particularly concentrated on King’s Parade and Trinity Street, which can get very crowded in the summer months. One result of this has been the installation of the barrier across King’s Parade to prevent vehicle-based terrorist attacks.
While I have some sympathy for the councillors who voted to install it, I think it’s a pretty horrible addition to the heart of our city. It obstructs pedestrians and cyclists, stops disabled drivers reaching their parking bays on King’s Parade for most of the day, and adds a garish splash of ugliness to our most iconic streetscape. Meanwhile any terrorist vehicle only has to drive round via Trinity Street to access King’s Parade with only a standard bollard or two in the way. If we have to have a barrier at the southern end, couldn’t we have something a bit more in keeping with its surroundings?
On the other hand I do give the city council credit for removing the bright blue dumpster-style plastic bins which used to adorn the pavement in front of King’s College Chapel. They didn’t do much for the street scene either, and their more subdued replacements are definitely an improvement.
Many thousands of Cambridge visitors enjoy a trip on the river. When Jack Scudamore first introduced leisure punting in the early 1900s, he might have been startled to learn how extensive - and lucrative - the city’s punting industry would be a century later. Guided tours rather than self-hires now dominate, and a 12-seater punt tour can bring in £300 in 45 minutes.
During the 2010s there were a number of battles over punting, particularly around punt companies touting for custom on the streets. At one stage punt touting got so extreme that you could buy a T-shirt with “No, I don’t want to go punting today” emblazoned on the front. In 2016 the city council brought in an order banning punt touts from most of the city centre, apart from a few restricted areas, and while the ban isn’t universally observed, complaints about touting have greatly decreased.
Another key moment came in 2018, when the council won a High Court battle to stop independent punt operators using Garret Hostel Lane and other council-owned land without permission. Punting in Cambridge now seems to be operating more smoothly - at least for the moment.
Barring another pandemic, it’s hard to see the numbers of Cambridge visitors falling any time soon, and the challenges - and opportunities - that they bring will be with us for the foreseeable future. It’s great that so many people want to visit our beautiful city - but please be gentle with it.
