For most of its eight hundred years, Cambridge kept its ideas close: in libraries, lecture halls and laboratories. Then, in the second half of the twentieth century, something changed. Ideas began walking out of the colleges and into small offices, sheds and spare rooms, and some of them grew into companies that changed the world.
One of the first was Cambridge Consultants, founded in 1960 by young graduates who wanted to put University brainpower to work on industry’s problems. A few years later, a University report recommended building space for science-based companies close to the University. In 1970 Trinity College decided to do just that, on its own land at the northern edge of the city. The Cambridge Science Park, the first of its kind in Britain, welcomed its first company in 1973.
Silicon Fen
By the early 1980s Cambridge was making pocket calculators and home computers. Sinclair’s machines and Acorn’s BBC Micro sat in classrooms and living rooms across the country, and a generation learned to code on them. In 1985 a team of local consultants studied the boom and gave it a name: the Cambridge Phenomenon. Newspapers preferred another one, Silicon Fen.
Acorn’s engineers had also designed their own small, efficient processor. In 1990 that work was spun out into a new company, ARM. Its designs now sit inside most of the world’s smartphones. In 2012 the Raspberry Pi, a credit-card-sized computer designed in Cambridge, brought cheap, hackable computing back into schools.
Big ideas, it turns out, often start with a conversation over lunch.
Today the phenomenon reaches far beyond computers, into medicine, genetics, materials and artificial intelligence, with labs and start-ups spreading across the fields around the city. What makes it work is hard to bottle, but people who have lived it tend to say the same thing: the city is small enough that a researcher, an engineer and an investor can bump into each other at a college dinner, in a lab corridor or, like Crick and Watson before them, in the pub.
[Fact-check before publishing: dates and company details.]