Britain | Bagehot

Getting to Cambridge

The political philosophy of Britain’s most successful city

“IT WAS just a bit of fun at the weekend,” shrugs Toby Norman, almost apologetically. Bagehot stifles a laugh at the understatement. The two are sitting in a 14th-century rectory, looking at three gizmos. Mr Norman’s team built the first, a brick of plastic and circuitry known as “The Hulk”, for a competition hosted by ARM, a Cambridge-based electronics firm. This attempt to create a device to help doctors and aid workers in poor countries store and retrieve patient data (along with the second, smaller version) attracted mentors and over $1m of investment. The third, all moulded plastic and contours, resembles the slick product that Mr Norman’s startup, SimPrints, will take to market in January. Its success story—a marriage of academia, private money and entrepreneurial savvy—exemplifies that of Cambridge.

It is hard to live in the city (as your columnist does) and not sense that one is amid something special. What began with the creation of business parks to host enterprising dons and their doctoral students in the 1970s has grown into the most exciting technology cluster in Europe. Microsoft probes the edges of its understanding in Cambridge. AstraZeneca, a drug giant, is building its new headquarters there. Apple is setting up shop. Some 4,000 knowledge-intensive firms exist in the orbit of a settlement of just 120,000 people. To drink in the pubs of its medieval old town is to mix with angel investors, Nobel prize-winning scientists and professors plotting their next startup with PhD students. A can-do spirit floats in the dank Fen air.

No surprise, then, that property prices are rising faster in Cambridge than anywhere else in Britain. With a productivity level 30% above London’s, it generates more patents per head than its next six British rivals put together, sports near-full employment and has more billion-dollar companies than cities ten times as big. Development theorists like Mr Norman call the path towards social and economic sophistication “getting to Denmark”. Within Britain one might reasonably call it “getting to Cambridge”.

It helps that the city has an 800-year-old university (the best in Britain and fifth in the world, according to new rankings this week) and is an hour from London. But that is not enough. So leaders from other British cities and beyond flock to analyse Cambridge’s success. A history of “the Cambridge phenomenon” by Charles Cotton, a local businessman, is being translated into Mandarin. All want to know: what is Cambridge’s secret?

Touring its laboratories and workshops, Bagehot confronted technologists and researchers with the same question. The responses were strikingly uniform. Each asked him to step away from or stop touching whatever bit of machinery he was curiously eyeing. Each, duly reassured, proceeded to praise what one might call the enlightened laissez-faire philosophy of the city’s academic and political leaders.

This is not to say that Cambridge is hands-off. From the 1960s onwards its university and council have worked together to create benign circumstances for enterprise: building business parks, incubators and housing estates, wooing investors, railing against Britain’s restrictive immigration regime and, most recently, trying to wrangle planning and even fiscal powers away from London. The city council, though dominated by leftists, works well with the right-leaning council of the surrounding district, and with the dons. “Cambridge is like an orchid; it will grow, but the conditions have to be just right,” says Tony Raven, who runs the university’s commercial arm.

As the comparison suggests, Cambridge’s authorities also refuse to micromanage. Their attitude—crystallised in a report published in 1969 by Nevill Mott, a physics professor who had chided them for rejecting IBM—is to support development, but without choosing what sorts of high-tech industry the city should prefer. The university encourages academics to set up companies (seeking a much smaller equity share in spin-offs than do its counterparts) and makes the membrane between its laboratories and Cambridge’s private firms as porous as possible. Jeremy Sanders, one of its pro-vice-chancellors, describes his philosophy when he ran the chemistry department: “hire people smarter than you, give them as much freedom and research funding as possible, stand back and reap the harvest ten years later.”

The liberal arts

That freedom, combined with the chance encounters that are possible in a small city full of brainy folk, means that much of Cambridge’s genius is off-balance-sheet. Entrepreneurs donate advice. Dons and angel investors take young firms under their wing. Companies invite students to help them. SimPrints, for example, hosts weekly “hacking” sessions during which young developers help solve its technical quandaries—and it also flies star volunteers out to Zambia to help test products. Fumiya Iida, one of the brains behind a robot that (terrifyingly) invents and builds new robots, notes that Cambridge is unusually good at inducing people from different disciplines (in his case zoology, genomics, computer science and engineering) to mingle, whereas elsewhere they exist in silos.

For more places to “get to Cambridge”, then, policymakers must take an interest in the long-term requirements of their local economy and troubleshoot for businesses as necessary, but leave the rest to human ingenuity and serendipity. For politicians in particular, such enlightened laissez-faire will not come easily. It is so much nicer to back the “industries of tomorrow” than merely to clear traffic jams, expand railway capacity, improve broadband speeds, free land for houses and offices and help smart foreign graduates to remain in Britain. But they should console themselves with the fact that these same quandaries are the main brake on places like Cambridge. Bagehot advises them: get these things right—no mean feat—and leave the rest to those clever people having a bit of fun at the weekend.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Getting to Cambridge"

Editing humanity: The prospect of genetic enhancement

From the August 22nd 2015 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Discover more

The future of Drax, Britain’s largest power plant

From coal to wood to carbon capture and storage?

A new hate-crime law in Scotland causes widespread concern

Transgender identity is protected; biological sex is not


Britain’s kings of sourdough

The rapid rise of a firm that makes bread very slowly