Part of the bohemian mythology of Cambridge, The Orchard Tea Room, Grantchester.
The river just 100 yards away, I didn't expect my walk through its meadows to take me into this famous 'tea room' on the way into the village.
(Apologies for a rather poor image - I felt quite intrusive raising my camera so just a quick snap, and I was rather zapped by the heat and couldn't see much!).
Cambridge University may have its academics and world changing research, but this is the beguiling and romantic side of the city.
This outside tea room goes back over 100 years.
The beautiful, charismatic and doomed poet Rupert Brooke lodged here at Orchard House around 1909. Brooke described his life here as idyllic and wrote about wandering around 'barefoot and almost naked', living on honey, eggs and milk.
He attracted a famously bohemian group of friends that defied the strict social and sexual conventions of their day and who would meet at the orchard for wild parties and to swim naked by moonlight in the river.
They became known as the Grantchester Group and included free thinkers, artists and intellectuals such as novelists Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster as well as economist John Maynard Keynes, artist Augustus John and philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
A carefree and dreamlike time, brought to an end by the realities of WW1 and so forever preserved in the mythology of Cambridge summers and journeys along the Cam through the Grantchester meadows.
Part of the bohemian mythology of Cambridge, The Orchard Tea Room, Grantchester.
The river just 100 yards away, I didn't expect my walk through its meadows to take me into this famous 'tea room' on the way into the village.
(Apologies for a rather poor image - I felt quite intrusive raising my camera so just a quick snap, and I was rather zapped by the heat and couldn't see much!).
Cambridge University may have its academics and world changing research, but this is the beguiling and romantic side of the city.
This outside tea room goes back over 100 years.
The beautiful, charismatic and doomed poet Rupert Brooke lodged here at Orchard House around 1909. Brooke described his life here as idyllic and wrote about wandering around 'barefoot and almost naked', living on honey, eggs and milk.
He attracted a famously bohemian group of friends that defied the strict social and sexual conventions of their day and who would meet at the orchard for wild parties and to swim naked by moonlight in the river.
They became known as the Grantchester Group and included free thinkers, artists and intellectuals such as novelists Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster as well as economist John Maynard Keynes, artist Augustus John and philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
A carefree and dreamlike time, brought to an end by the realities of WW1 and so forever preserved in the mythology of Cambridge summers and journeys along the Cam through the Grantchester meadows.