The Last Stop On The Internet

Vintage album covers meet the IKEA catalogue. Unfortunately can’t link direct to images though. Clickthrough on the title.

One of my locals in Cambridge may be demolished.

Architecturally it’s one of the most interesting pubs in town. A public bar, lounge, yard, barn, and hundred capacity music venue, with a single central bar, set in an imposing neo-Georgian public house. Apparetly it’s among the only surviving examples of its architect’s work in the region. The current landlords have done a really good job of modernising what the pub provides by way of entertainment - everything from standup comedy to pool leagues to super-8 festivals -, whilst retaining a fair few casks, period features and maintaining a friendly, low key local atmosphere.

The gig space is superlative, and doesn’t really have an equal in the city in terms of capacity (the Man on The Moon on Norfolk Street is 250). It’s been played by everyone from Editors to members of Spinal Tap to my brother’s band and forms a vital part of the Cambridge music scene.

The pub stands on a prominent corner, but the buildings behind it on the site are largely empty, and there is a plan to put in flats. Presumably the hypothetical tenants of these flats don’t want to have live music being played four nights a week, so the pub will have to go, with a ‘new’ Portland Arms being built elsewhere. I can’t imagine that the new building will have as much idiosyncratic charm as the old one though: though some of the new ‘landmark’ buildings in Cambridge are impressive (such as the Newton mathematics building, and the Grand Arcade), much of the mixed-use and residential development looks uninspired, and is usually built with seeming disregard for its surroundings or indeed functionality (e.g. the house at the end of Pretoria Road that’s a floor too tall, the Travelodge, which just looks abysmal, or the old folks’ home a little further down Milton Road, with its minimal, tiny, windows).

I hope Greene King and the developers take on board what people in Cambridge are saying.

Via Life Image Archive: 14 yr-old inventor Donald Rich w. “Robotron” walking robot designed as a computer at Intl. Gadget & Invention show at Madison Square Garden