History

The working river: barges, cargo and the trade behind Quayside

Coal, salt, fish and wine all reached Cambridge by boat for hundreds of years, and most of it was landed near this quay. Parts of that story are firmly documented. Others rest on one old man's memory, and we flag those as we go.

An inland port

Look at a map and Cambridge seems an unlikely port, with the coast so far off. Even so, vessels worked up from the Wash for centuries, and Lynn acted as the town's harbour until the 1800s. Writing in 1959, the Victoria County History put river traffic at the top of the local economy, naming 1118 to 1845 as the years when this waterway mattered most.

How early it began is an open question. The Liber Eliensis, a medieval chronicle, placed Cambridge alongside Norwich, Ipswich and Thetford in the 10th century. Peter Bryan's 2008 book goes further and has Danish traders settled around Quayside by about 900, in a district called the Hulme. The diggers disagree. A 2017 report on excavations at Thompson's Lane finds no support for a significant settlement in St Clement's parish then, and starts occupation around the mid-10th century beside Bridge Street. Perhaps traders came and went without leaving traces, or perhaps the earlier date is wrong. Nobody has shown which.

Wharves with names

Evidence from the reign of Edward I (1272 to 1307) gives us the waterfront by name. Starting from the common hythe, or Sedgehithe, just north of the Great Bridge, the landing places ran along the bank to just below the Small Bridges, now Silver Street. They were:

  • Dame Nichole's Hythe
  • Cornhythe
  • Flaxhythe
  • Salthythe
  • Cholleshithe

Corn, flax and salt are easy enough to read in those names. Who Dame Nichole was, we can't tell you. The common hythe seems to have been somewhere near today's Quayside, but our sources neither mark the exact spot nor say which bank it stood on.

What came up and what went down

Grain was the great export. In 1177 sixteen Cambridge men paid fines for sending it off by water without royal permission, and in 1202 King John had £67 12s. worth shipped to Norway. Protests later blamed exports for dear grain under Elizabeth I, even citing the "pinching of poor scholars' bellies", only for the Privy Council to back the London trade.

Sea fish travelled the other way, and by the 1500s so did coal. The Mayor and some partners risked a venture to Newcastle for four shiploads in 1544, with the town standing behind them. Trouble at sea was a real fear: in 1702 Cambridge petitioned the Lord High Admiral for armed protection of its ships.

For a snapshot of everyday cargo, try the Foreigners' Companion of 1748, which lists:

  • Wine brought through Lynn
  • Coal at seven to nine pence a bushel
  • Peat, plus sedge that bakers burned in ovens
  • Osiers, reeds and rushes for various trades
  • Seed oil from mills in the Isle of Ely
  • Butter, 1,500 to 2,000 firkins weekly, bound for London by waggon

Oddly, that guide adds that local butter was sold drawn out into yard-long rolls, about the width of a walking cane.

Sturbridge Fair and the quarrel with Lynn

Without the river, Sturbridge Fair could hardly have grown as it did. Defoe wrote of Kent and Surrey hops arriving at the fair field by water. A charter of 1589 calls it England's largest and most famous fair, a flattering line from a document in the town's favour, so take it with some salt. Modern spelling varies too: "Stourbridge" isn't found before 1763.

Relying on a single port bred resentment. Lynn was defending its toll exemption at Cambridge as early as 1286. Arbitrators drew up terms in 1551, but by 1599 they were needed again, after seized cargoes, a strike of sorts by Lynn porters, and pitch and tar impounded at the fair.

Keeping the river open

Draining the fens alarmed both university and town, who were sure the Cam would run dry. Thomas Fuller later admitted the panic had outrun the harm. Still, Denver Sluice did shut tidal water out, and by 1697 complaints about the Lynn route had reached Parliament.

Out of this came the Conservators of the River Cam, empowered to levy tolls and spend them on navigation. Punting is licensed by the same body today. Sources split on their start: 1703 in the Victoria County History, 27 February 1702 elsewhere. An old-style calendar, with the year turning in March, could explain the gap.

Money was good for a while. In 1823 the Conservators put £400 towards the new Great Bridge, which still stands as Magdalene Bridge.

You may hear that barge horses were banned from college land along the Backs, and so waded through the river on an underwater towpath. General accounts repeat this happily. An early source for it has so far escaped us.

Who worked here

Cargo leaves more paperwork than people do, but a few names survive. David Dant, waterman, born in St Ives, appears at 3 Quayside in the 1861 census, an address also linked to a pub called the Jolly Waterman. Close by lived a brewer, a slater and a laundress. Going further back, one yard here held a warehouse by 1573, after earlier use for barrel making or brewing.

Over the bridge in Fisher's Lane, bargees lodged in the houses, according to the caption on a photograph of about 1880. Isaac Strange, a boat builder, was living there in 1861. Writing in the Cambridge Chronicle in 1929, W. F. Turner recalled how busy that wharf had once been. His column has a grim joke as well: an old woman, told a dead dog was floating by her water bucket, answered that she always boiled it. Treat that as folklore with a point about sanitation.

Turner is less reliable on the Pickerel Inn, where he has ferrymen from before the first bridge using a cock pit room. Since the Great Bridge is recorded by 875 and the inn's traditional date is 1608, something has been garbled. A later ferry might lie behind it.

J. H. Bullock, writing in 1939, pictured quays and warehouses on both banks, either side of the bridge, with Quayside taking the bulk of goods. From his boyhood he remembered hearing about "bridge-porters" leaning on the bridge until work turned up.

When did the trade end?

Pick a source and you get a different date.

  • 1845: trains arrive, and the Victoria County History speaks of a death-blow. Tolls drop from £1,393 in 1846 to £367 by 1850.
  • 1860s: J. W. Clark still describes "half a hundred black barges" on the Lynn run, loaded with coal, turf and sedge.
  • 1898: toll receipts stand at a mere £99.
  • First World War: most commercial carrying has stopped by now, says one history of eastern canals.
  • Late 1930s: Banhams keep tugs and barges going, taking gas water from the gasworks down to Lynn.
  • 1962: Quayside's directory entry shows a tyre firm, a motor trimmer and S. J. Tyrrell's boatyard.
  • About 1978: a council safety report of 2008 says trade here stopped some 30 years before. It offers no explanation, and the date sits oddly with everything above. It could mean boatyards or small local jobs.

Our best guess is a slow fade rather than an ending. The railway took away the trade's importance, barges thinned out over about 70 years, and boat work lingered around the quay for decades more.

From cargo to punts

Capturing Cambridge dates the first pleasure punts to about 1902 to 1904, when the barges were already going. According to the Museum of Cambridge, the punt's flat bottom and width come from lighters, small boats that took goods upriver from ports, and leisure use grew once the river had cleared. It's a persuasive idea, though the article cites nothing for it.

Little of the old quay remains to see, since the present buildings are largely modern. The high steps in the wall might date from the cargo days, but the 2008 report's author offers that only as a belief. Below ground the record is better, as Beneath Quayside explains.

The people are on who lived on Quayside, and the waterfront appears on three old maps.

Sources

Sources checked October 2026. Where we rely on another writer's account of an older document, we name that writer.

See where it happened

Quayside and Fisher's Lane lie on either side of Magdalene Bridge.

Visiting Quayside