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Vanishing
Cambridgeshire
Mike Petty, in association with the
Cambridge Antiquarian Society
Updated to include Ely and the Fens
In 1925 a group of Cambridge antiquarians set off
on a journey into the unknown. They loaded their car
with the equipment they would need, their cameras,
tripods and glass-plate negatives. Their journey took
them into an undiscovered landscape of ancient remains,
crumbling churches and dilapidated cottages. While
others explored the relics of ancient Egypt and the
tomb of Tutankamum, these intrepid explorers never
strayed more than a few miles from the magnificent
towers of the university town of Cambridge.
For this was Cambridgeshire in the interwar years.
The explorers – a printer, a doctor, an anatomist
and a pathologist – were members of the Cambridge
Antiquarian Society and they were reviving a project
that had begun at the start of the century. Their
mission was to produce a photographic survey of Cambridgeshire,
to record both buildings and a way of life, the vanishing
landmarks of a region. Now Cambridgeshire historian
Mike Petty has made a powerful selection of photographs
from their pioneering survey to give this insight
into a world that has disappeared forever.
Here are evocative photographs of the town of Cambridge
itself in the 1920s and 1930s – the market and
the town centre, Trumpington Street, St John’s,
Bridge Street, Northampton Street and Castle End,
the Holy Sepulchre, East Fields, West Fields and the
river. But here also are the characteristic landscapes
of rural Cambridgeshire, from ancient earthworks and
Roman roads, churches and monasteries, to farms, country
houses and cottages, windmills and watermills. Here,
indeed, is vanished Cambridgeshire in all its detail
and variety.
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