Cambridge, drawn from its own streets.

Cambridge on paper

The Cam runs north through the middle of the frame, and the open ground follows it the whole way. The Backs are lawns and gardens rather than streets, so the print shows a broad soft band beside the river, with the college enclosures on one side of it and the meadows on the other. Above the centre, Jesus Green and Midsummer Common carry that band further north, and to the east Parker's Piece sits as a perfect square of green with its paths crossing corner to corner — the most geometric thing in the city and, at this frame, one of the easiest to recognise.

The colleges themselves read as courts: perimeters of building around open ground, tight against the river, with lanes between them narrow enough to disappear at a wide frame and countable at a tight one. Around them the medieval street pattern survives in short kinked runs, and the market square opens as a small hard rectangle in the middle.

Beyond the centre the grain is Victorian. Mill Road crosses the railway and gathers a dense grid of terraces around it in Romsey, and Chesterton does something similar north of the river. The station sits south-east with its own sidings, and the newer research parks close the frame's edges. Four and a half kilometres across holds all of it — the colleges, the commons, the river and both terraced districts — which is why a Cambridge print reads well even at A3.