There comes a depressing – if liberating – point in every Oxonian’s life when they must admit that C*mbridge is a nicer city than their alma mater. I think I always knew it, deep down, as my mother took me from college to college as a wide-eyed 16-year-old. But since she’d attended, going to Oxford became my little act of teenage rebellion. Only since leaving the House behind have I been honest with myself.
I therefore welcome Michael Gove’s recent announcement of ‘Cambridge 2040’. Not only because it’s the latest deft conjuring trick from a minister who borrows as liberally from David Blaine as Create Streets, but because building 200,000 to 250,000 more homes – more than doubling the city’s current population – will provide the houses and lab space that this country desperately needs.
The AI-generated vision for the scheme that accompanied Gove’s announcement – turning the dreams of Nicholas Boys Smith and the late Roger Scruton into high definition, if occasionally wonky, reality – promised beautiful townhouses, attractive tram networks, and the promise of “a world-class concert hall”. He only needed to say he was also privatising social housing and I’d be in seventh heaven.
But the announcement isn’t only designed to populate the nocturnal fantasies of YIMBYs and architect trads alike. The idea of making Cambridge the “Silicon Valley of Europe” is a potent one. It sits happily with Rishi Sunak’s ambition of making Britain a “science superpower” like that Californian paradise in which he is so at home. It could be like Barbie-land, with more green industries and punting trips.
Yet whilst I welcome Gove’s announcement (and audacity), one must be aware of an element that sits uneasily. There may well be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than the ninety-odd people who need not to. But one can’t help but mention that the Levelling-Up Secretary was also the man who killed off the “Oxford-Cambridge Arc” only last year.
For those not anal enough to have followed the tergiversations of development projects in the South-East, the “Oxford-Cambridge Arc” was a proposal to connect the UK’s – and thus the world’s – finest universities with the manufacturing hub of Milton Keynes by building hundreds of thousands of new homes, transport links, and reviving the old Varsity line. Peter Hitchens hated it, unsurprisingly.
In its original form, drawn up in 2017 by the National Infrastructure Commission, the Arc aimed to deliver one million more homes, 700,000 new jobs, and boost the average productivity of the region by £6,000 a head by 2050. The suggestion was that it could add 3 per cent to the nation’s GDP and provide homes and jobs within commuting distance of London, dreaming spires, and concrete cows.
Positive noises were made about it by successive Chancellors. Both Philip Hammond and Sajid Javid have signalled that they believe that the Government should be as enthusiastic about this Arc as Noah was about its long-distant predecessor. Politicians have long been aware of this country’s anaemic growth, even if it took the sacrifice of the forty-nine-day queen to turn it into the current buzzword.
Which raises the obvious question: whatever happened to the hub of tomorrow? The mood music around the Arc changed as soon as Boris Johnson entered Downing Street. With his government’s enthusiasm for “levelling-up” the North and Midlands, making one of the South-East’s wealthiest areas even better off lost its appeal. Losing Chesham and Amersham then toxified the YIMBY cause.
It also did for Robert Jenrick’s stint as the Cabinet minister for the relevant department. In came Michael Gove as his replacement, with a new job, a rechristened ministry, and a political (and personal) interest in shifting his sights to above Watford Gap. The Financial Times reports a 40-man unit working on the project was disbanded “within weeks” of Gove entering the department.
The clear sense one is given is that whilst the project is not officially dead – and is kept on life-support by the occasional bung from the Treasury – it has been very much deprioritised. This is hardly an unpopular move. A Campaign to Protect Rural England poll in 2019 suggested 74 per cent of residents of the area were opposed to the move. Local Conservative MPs have also not been overwhelmingly enthusiastic.
Parts of the project endured. Last autumn, Jeremy Hunt recommitted to a £5 billion initiative to revive the “Varsity line” (which survived Dr Beeching, but not Harold Wilson). Earlier this year, £2.5 million was put towards a board encouraging local collaboration. Whilst welcome – and in tune with Gove’s rejection of top-down schemes – it was hardly the spades in the ground that campaigners wanted.
So where has the new scheme come from? Is it a desperate attempt by a former President of the Oxford Union to use the dying days of a Conservative government to carpet bomb the old enemy? Or has one too many Create Streets pamphlet been wafted under Gove’s nose, and thus ‘Cambridge 2040’ exists as a long-winded effort to shut them up? Alas, nothing so esoteric.
I have been reliably informed that this project has been kicking around the Department for Levelling-Up for a year or so. The crucial point to note is that it is an entirely separate proposal to the Oxford-Cambridge Arc. It is designed to tackle a particular problem: the lack of provision for lab space in Cambridge – especially when compared to Silicon Valley – but wrapped in traditional branding.
Naturally, the Silicon Valley angle chimes well with the Prime Minister’s instincts. Building on brownfield also assuages the concerns of Tory MPs – notwithstanding Anthony Browne’s cask strength response – and provides a clear contrast with Keir “Carpet the Green Belt” Starmer. But those are happy additions to a policy that would likely have emerged anyway.
Any government will have to confront the interlocking consequences of our lack of lab space, woeful under-supply of housing, and sclerotic growth rate. That first the “Oxford-Cambridge Arc” and now ‘Cambridge 2040’ have got the support that they have is a sign of this depressing truth. If Britain is to avoid its fate as a poor, irrelevant, and over-sized Bicester Village, something like this must be done.
The hope, therefore, is that this project will endure despite any change of government between here and 2040. One should therefore not portray Gove – fedora and CGI-clad – as cracking his whip at NIMBY colleagues as he raids his lost Arc, but instead as a minister sticking his head above the parapet, and flying a kite for a scheme that any future government will have to address.