Visualising Space as Place: The Invention of Oxbridge

** ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED VIA COMPASS MAGAZINE BLOG BY SAME AUTHOR ** 

1209. A few students leave the stuffy spires of The Other Place and decamp to The Bridge, a land of denser castle-colleges sitting on the edge of the river Cam with similar traditions and a lighter blue sky. Or so the legend goes. The all-knowing, ever-present, fancy-punting-today-ladies tour guides will tell you something along those lines as they push you along the Cam, woven into soliloquies about Prince Charles failing his exams whilst his body-guard passed, cheeky Clare students scaring tourists into the water with a polystyrene ball, and John’s architecture snubbing Trinity with its eagle, et cetera ad infinitum.

Dusk in Clare College.

You know the tropes: New York, the city that never sleeps; Rome, the city of love; London, the city of fog. Oxford, the city of dreaming spires. Cambridge. The city of sleep-depriving, caffeine-fuelled essay-crises? Anonymous crushbridge stanzas? Generally mild weather with winter fog you can catch if you row or, more keenly, wake up before 8am? Turrets, bridges and a dome to boot?

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography, wrote John Berger. Every space, I would add, has a multitude of identities (‘places’) that have very little to do with its physical reality. That is, place is by its very nature intertextual and subjective; the idea of the ‘city’ is hence one interpretation of a particular space. Is Cambridge a tweed-coated, middle-aged male, a musky masculine hermit static in his study since the traverse from Oxford? Or perhaps a girl in her twenties, weaving between tourists over curved bridges and dropping library reservations as she goes? Or, perhaps, both. Or neither.

Joseph Mallord William Turner pictures Cambridge, quite literally, as a quiet, hazy arcadia, an Eden before Adam and Eve with docile college buildings and drooping trees, in his Romantic watercolour, ‘Clare Hall and King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, from the banks of the River Cam’ (1793). A.E. Houseman paints a similar idea of Cambridge as ‘an asylum, in every sense of the world’. This sense of timelessness and displacement from reality also pervades Stephen Fry’s admission that he ‘went to Cambridge and thought [he] would say there’: ‘I thought I would quietly grow tweed in a corner somewhere and become a Don or something’. Sylvia Plath, on the contrary, sees in Cambridge ‘particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost like a caricature series from Dickens to see our head table at Newnham’.

Virginia Woolf is the only one who really gets it right. ‘Oxbridge is an invention’, she concludes.

We partake in this invention everyday: filtering and cropping it in the pictures we Instagram of a melancholy Clare bridge surrounded by golding foliage or flickering candles surrounded by crested cutlery and half-empty wine glasses at formal; thickening its plot in the stories we tell to those outside the bubble of eccentric supervisors in medieval rooms and piles of essays in corners of musty libraries; performing its myth in the traditions we profess a desire to elide but secretly, really, enjoy. Far from the rather empty existentialist conclusion that everything is a social construct and that’s the end of it, this invention of the physical space(s) collectively termed ‘Oxbridge’ speaks to the life of space as something never-static but ever-changing. Significantly, this, by extension, hints that we can change it. For better or worse.

One of Henri Lefebvre’s most significant philosophical contributions to the study of urban theory is his idea of the production of space (see: ‘The Production of Space’, 1991). Lefebvre analyses three modes of spatialization, from natural, ‘absolute’ space to more complex spatialities whose significance is socially produced, as a dialectic between le perçu (everyday practices and perceptions), le conçu (representations or theories of space) and le vécu (the spatial imaginary of time). Using his framework, the construction of place interposed upon space (the invented idea of Oxbridge interposed on the physical cities of Cambridge and Oxford) can be understood to perform active work as, in Lefevbre’s terms, a means of production. For Oxbridge, this could translate into questions of access, or subjective future opportunity, or social change.

Whatever the (very real) implications of the social production of space, the intertextual subjectivity of place and the invention of Oxbridge, it is at least undeniable that place, distinguished from space, is at base an imaginative identity. Whether the tweed-coated middle-aged masculine hermit or fresh-faced, library-hopping girl, what you understand Cambridge to be is largely unique to you. Cambridge is thus not one place, but many understandings of place, some more pervasive and active than others yet never solitary, situated in the space(s) collectively termed ‘Cambridge’.