Share your Mill Road stories
What does Mill Road mean to you? Do you live or have you ever lived on Mill Road? Has a significant moment in your life happened on or around Mill Road – or do you have any stories of friendship or funny anecdotes that you would like to share with the rest of the Mill Road community?
Post your Mill Road story as a comment to this article.
Stories can be as short as one sentence and as long as 500 words. The best entries will be selected and published as a collection of short stories that will be made available in paperback or as an e-book after the Winter Fair.
If you would like your story to be considered for selection, don’t forget to include your e-mail address when posting it (please use the field provided; e-mail addresses will not be publicly visible on the website).
22nd September 2006. My very first day in Cambridge. I get a taxi from the train station – ask the driver to take me to my hotel, which according to Google Maps is a bit out of town. He says something that I don’t quite understand. You’ll get better, I say to myself; but I can’t help wondering whether moving here was a good decision.
Everything is new and exciting and a bit scary. Streets and streets of Victorian terraced houses, red and brown bricks, blue doors. Everything looks so different from home; driving on the left side of the road seems wrong and is giving me nausea.
We are now driving down a long, narrow street. There’s shops everywhere; they don’t look anything like the ones I will see later in the city centre. I spot a Chinese take-away, a couple of charity shops, lots of cafes, a butcher’s. The taxi slows down, there is traffic on the bridge. I can hear trains speeding somewhere below me.
Trains make me feel safe. Where I come from, trains are everywhere and train noise is the unofficial soundtrack of my life. Milan. You know what people think Milan is like. Well, it’s not all glamour: where I live there are no fashion boutiques or expensive restaurants. There is a kebab house, though, and a butcher’s, and if you walk all the way out of town you can still see the old steel factories and the warehouses where my granddad worked.
My granddad also had a small wine shop, long before I was born, but had to sell it because my grandmother was afraid of the drunks. The butcher’s shop is there now. I remember buying sausages from him with my mother. The owner was constantly talking about politics: he was a communist, but I was too young to know. He wouldn’t speak to you if he saw you shopping at the supermarket. In his late years he tried to organise a local trader’s union, but without much success; he got old and left the shop to his son, a quiet man who minds his own business and likes to talk about food rather than Marx.
As the taxi starts moving again, I wonder what the local butcher is like. And look, there seems to be quite a few community centres, I should check them out. Indeed, the more I look, the more this place, despite being still alien to me, becomes strangely familiar. I might not be too far away from home, after all…
When Steve and I first came to Cambridge, after 8 years in Oxford (boo) and then two years in Boston, we booked a rented house on-line. The address was ‘Bar Hill’ and we thought “Oh great. A hill. I don’t think Cambridge has many hills, so this will be good.”
Within a couple of days of arriving we set off, each and separately, to look for somewhere to live in the long term. At the end of the first day we met up in the evening and had an argument. I said I had found the perfect place to live, busy, interesting and, because Cambridge is too small to support a China Town or an Italian Quarter or whatever, really genuininely mixed. I thought it was an interesting and lively area. Steve said no, *he* had found the area which he thought would be good for us. It had a lovely atmosphere, was handy for the town centre and for the station, the right side of town for Addenbrooke’s where he would be working. It wasn’t until the weekend, when we had a chance to go looking together, that we realised that we were talking about the same place!
We soon bought a house and have stayed here ever since. Every now and then we think about moving away, but I don’t think we could ever live anywhere else in Cambridge/shire now. It’s lovely that we still feel so very much at home here.
I have *lots* of stories to tell about Mill Road and, if other people start telling theirs, I will start telling mine.
Moving to Cambridge was the plan for years. I was already involved with Strawberry fair and made regular, long trips to Cambridge to attend planning meetings. When the time was right I scooped up my belongings in to a hankie on a stick (actually six car loads) and unwrapped my life in this beautiful town.
Discovering the Cambridge I had never experienced before was pure delight. In the July I moved here, I spent time cycling on my new bike, a very necessary purchase, to the Mill Pond, Grantchester, the Backs and visiting colleges and punting. However, it was when I got to Parkside Pools and carried on that I fell in love.
I packed up my hankie again and moved my roots across town to Devonshire Road. From the window of my living room I gazed out at the bottom of the cycle bridge. There was rarely a moment when you didn’t see a cyclist whizz by, children playing in the courtyard opposite or a kaleidoscope of pedestrians wandering to and from wherever. Daily bus loads of young travellers packed into the YHA hostel at the end of the road. Commuters spilled from the station, collecting their bikes from the nest of thousands locked to anything immovable. The more adventurous tourists left the familiarity of gown and ventured further to find us.
Mill Road quickly became the hub of my social life as I haunted the freehouses and perched in the many café window seats. Shopping expeditions to Al-Amins, Cho Mee, Bacchanalia, Arjuna and Cutlacks filled hours. Reading endless books in Amnesty, CB1, Libra Aries and in the sun on Parker’s Piece and Donkey Common. I felt at home, and slowly stitched myself into the fabric of this place. Life in all its colours, textures, sounds and smells lived here. Unhappy in the safe and sleepy pigeon holes of suburbia, I found the diversity and excitement I needed.
Constantly changing, the Mill Road groove is unmistakeable; just walk down the road anytime to feel it. A recession has closed some much-loved shops; I’ll miss The Cherry Tree and Mr Stacey’s Most Excellant Video Emporium. However, in months to come we’ll see the new Mosque open, enlivening the very tip of Mill Road, I look forward to a new wet fish shop on Broadway, and a Sushi place right at the end of my road. The Calcutta Club with a theatre style kitchen will be next on my list to test out and now the black Cat have started live music on Friday’s I’ll have to split my time between them and the Kingston or the Blue.
People are the soul and spirit of our beloved Mill Road and as long as we’re here a Mill Road there will be.
My overridng and current memory is knowing Big Mal the legend who lives along Mill Rd. He has contributed so much to Mill Rd life from helping the local Lollipop Lady to recycling TV`s to a worthy cause.
Lollipop wimmin grrrrr Dont Get Me Started.
We’re All Neighbours contribution:
http://www.wereallneighbours.co.uk/idlechat/message.php?id=36137&page=1
I am always surprised by the number of Mill Road residents who have been drawn here from other places. I, like many residents of Cambridge, was born in Mill Road and had my children there too. My youngest daughter being one of the last babies born at Mill Road in 1983. I remember and still mourn the Library where I spent many happy hours as a child. Shops have come and gone. Who remembers Barnies? The street is still a vibrant and interesting place but sadly outside my price bracket as a place to live.