The Grafton Centre is situated not far from the large Elizabeth Way roundabout where Newmarket Road heads out of town past Barnwell towards the village of Stow-cum-Quy.

Behind the Leper Chapel on Newmarket Road, the site of Barnwell Junction railway station once contained a gravel pit. The remains of reindeer, mammoths, woolly rhino and horse were found here and have been dated to about 20,000 years old. At this time in the last Ice Age, ice sheets had ramped up on the North Norfolk coast, making the Cambridge area a very chilly ice-bound, high arctic environment. You can see the remains of these animals in the Sedgwick Museum.

Newmarket Road follows a ridge of gravel from the Quy (A14) roundabout to the east, all the way into Cambridge. When you get to the Grafton Centre, the ridge joins a broader river terrace. The gravel ridge represents the course of a now defunct eastern tributary of the River Cam. It is clear that this 'father' of the present Cam used to be quite a considerable stream that joined the ancient River Cam somewhere near the Grafton Centre. We can tell this because we find the ancient river deposits - gravel, sand and mud all along the ridge, but now the river doesn't exist anymore. For some reason the supply of water was cut off and through 'inversion of relief' the bed of that river now forms a ridge of gravel that makes a rampart - a wall, and has held back water that has formed a broad depression now occupied by Coldham's Common.

Under the intense freezing and thawing conditions of the last Ice Age, the permanently frozen ground (permafrost) would melt turning the soil to slurry, collapse and release water forming a pool. Sunlight would heat the water and further melt the permafrost making the pool bigger and bigger. Some 20,000 years ago, Coldham's Common was a muddy lake of melted sludge and slurry! As the lake got bigger it needed an outlet, and this formed between the Leper Chapel and Cambridge United football ground. There would be a huge outpouring of liquid slurry into the ancient River Cam draining the lake and leaving a flat-bottomed hollow that can be traced across a large part of southern Cambridge.

The small area of grass that you see now is called New Square, and before the development of the Grafton Centre it used to be a car park!

The land where the Grafton Centre stands was for centuries just fields. It was where people grew their food. The village of Barnwell stood approximately where the Elizabeth Way roundabout is situated. Suddenly in the 19th century the area exploded as people flocked into Cambridge looking for jobs and coming in from the land because of mechanisation and drops in wages. There were better jobs in Cambridge on the railway, building colleges and digging copralites (find out more about the copralite mining rush in Stage 6).

As people flocked in from the land most of the housing that took place was on East Road and the Newmarket Road area. Much of this housing was dreadful and has since been demolished. As the area built up there became a problem with prostitution...

What makes Cambridge unique is that there wasn't just one important or rich person dominating it. The university dominated the city and it had powers and priveleges that the townspeople resented and there were often riots between the two. One of the things the university could do, right up until the late 1890's was to lock up what they thought were loose women. If you wore a dropped neck and bare arms you were obviously trying to flirt with the students and they could lock you up!

There was a prison called the Spinning House which is where the council housing offices are now based on Regent Street. You couldn't have a lawyer, you were tried by university courts and you were locked up for two or three weeks just for the fact that you might be a threat to undergraduates… And you might have been…

If you were someone who'd flocked in, living in dire housing conditions, you'd be desparate for money… so maybe one of the ways to get money was by 'servicing' the students? It seems quite probable that what the university called prostitution, was actually more a case of child abuse - as the scholars took advantage of the young girls who worked and cleaned in the student lodging houses - maybe these women didn't have a choice? In the 1830's, just off Newmarket Road, the Cambridge Female Refuge was set up to try and save these poor unfortunate girls.

The refuge was founded because of the peculiar nature of Cambridge where you would see an annual influx of rich young men… Girls were not allowed to study so the men who came to the city every year created a social inbalance. As a young girl, not only could you be locked up for walking down Regent Street by the university authorities, you might end up in the female refuge, and the Barnwell area was where a lot of the girls who were called prostitutes lived. The records of the Spinning House are kept at the University Library and show where the people lived... So Barnwell got quite a notorious reputation in the 19th century - most of which was totally unfair!

Cross diagonally over New Square and walk along Jesus Terrace and then Clarendon Street towards Parker's Piece.

As you walk along Clarendon Street you will see some lovely streets called Elm Street, Orchard Street, Eden Street, Paradise Street and Adam & Eve Street. This is because the whole area was called the Garden of Eden allotments - a beautiful name for an area that got such a bad name!

The roofs of these terraced houses are great for swifts to nest in, and there is quite a good population in this area (although you won't see them in winter... they'll be in Africa!).

At the end of Clarendon Street, turn left and walk up Parkside until the pedestrian crossing where you should cross over to Parker's Piece.