Review of Griff Rhys Jones talk for CambridgePPF. Babbage Lecture Theatre (David Attenborough Building), University of Cambridge, Friday 28 November.
By Anna Gazeley.
Griff Rhys Jones began by saying he had not come to tell Cambridge what to do.
He came to start debate, something he believes we have far too little of in society today. The lively kind. The inconvenient kind. The kind that shapes ideas before they set like concrete. Cambridge is not distant to him. He studied here, acted here, muddled through essays and late rehearsals like so many before and after. His interest is not advisory from afar, it is rooted in affection and experience. He wants this city to grow well, not merely expand.
Growth, he argued, is not simply a matter of square metres or targets met. Cities live through what they choose to keep as much as what they choose to build. Old is not bad, new is not bad, but trouble begins when one is treated as disposable and the other as inevitable. A place is not a blank sheet awaiting the next scheme. It is a conversation across time.
If you do not care about your own back yard, who will?
This was not a rebuke. It was an invitation to join the conversation, a reminder that we shape what we defend, not just what we permit.
With the Local Plan now out for consultation, the future of Cambridge is on paper, not fixed, but forming. Streets, skylines, transport corridors and green margins will be influenced not by one decision, but by who decides to speak. Nearly ninety per cent of planning applications are approved, Griff reminded us, so the idea that conservation is obstruction is a convenient fiction. Good cities are built where challenge improves design, not where silence allows damage by default.
He acknowledged the difficulty of pushing back in a landscape of well-funded developers and polished applications. Yet communities are not powerless, only quieter when acting alone. Stand up. Link arms. Make a bit of noise. Join with groups like CPPF Griff suggests. That is how residents gain voice, expertise and influence. It is how heritage is defended, nature recovery strengthened, and a transport future shaped with wisdom instead of haste.
Because, Griff asked, when people come to Cambridge in fifty years, will they thank us for what we left behind, or curse us for what we destroyed?
Builders or blockers is not the real question.
The real question is who is building, and for whom.
We are custodians of a city with a past worth honouring, a present worth enriching, and a future we might one day like our children to thank us for. The task is not to stop the world from changing. It is to guide change with care, so what we build now becomes someone else’s good inheritance, not their lament.
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