Quite beautiful post from perhaps the UK's best journalist on matters online, John Naughton, inspired by the simple act of returning to Cambridge:
"For me, its beauty is not just a matter of architecture (or 'inhabited ruins', as one of my friends once put it) but of the fact that it's the place where Erasmus and Newton and Darwin and Maxwell and Rutherford and Tennyson and Wittgenstein and Russell and Whitehead and GR Moore and Keynes and Alfred Marshall lived, studied and worked. I often walk past the room where, in 1932, John Cockroft and Ernest Walton split the atom; the lab where J.J. Thompson discovered the electron; the room where James Watson and Francis Crick sussed the molecular structure of DNA; the building where Frank Whittle invented the jet engine; or -- in Hinxton, just outside Cambridge -- the lab where John Sulston and his team led the decoding of the human genome and kept that knowledge in the public domain. In other words, the magic of Cambridge for me is bound up with the knowledge it has produced -- the ideas (or 'intellectual property' if you must) which belongs to all of us and has incalculably enriched our lives." [my emphasis]
This obviously resonates with notions of psychogeography, but more precisely, conjures the notion of Raymond Williams' structure of feeling, which I've mentioned before. It's roughly defined as the distilled residue of the lived experience of a community over and above the institutional and ideological organisation of society or place. In other words, the accretion of knowledge and lived experience implicit within a place - this has particular impact in cities, due to the layers of history visible and colliding, invisible and fading. And Naughton quite beautifully articulates how he feels the wondrous weight of that intellect in Cambridge.
