Comparing Cambridge and punting around

A quick observation from my visit to Cambridge

I’ve been to Cambridge twice previously. Once for a mini-break meeting friends and another time for a wedding that happened to be in one of the college halls.

This visit, during Cambridge Tech Week, was the first time for anything work related.

I had already been trying to contact the Bradfield Centre and St John’s Innovation Centre for this blog, and luckily the Monday session was to include both venues, as well as a visit to the offices of Cambridge Consultants and PwC.

A comparison via Wikipedia gives the following.

Bournemouth: The 2021 census built-up area had a population of 196,455 for an area of 40.2 square km.

Cambridge: As of the 2021 census, the city had a population of 145,700 for an area of 41 square km.

In a short space of time I had visited three innovation centres, saw many small businesses working on a whole range of themes. I heard from business owners running a spinout from university research. This was just one park, where it was full of big buildings of businesses, institutes and so on.

There are 24 similar business parks in Cambridge.

At the Tuesday night CyNam event, I heard an open source chip project that has been funded to hundreds of millions of pounds so far, with the likes of Google putting sizeable amounts of money in.

I just left astounded, fighting all the urges to compare Cambridge to Bournemouth.

I went to the Great South West’s first conference. There was a slide showing that the economic value of the region, which spans Cornwall & Isles of Scilly, Devon, Dorset and Somerset, is the same as Greater Manchester. Not sure if the goal was to say we are doing well or underperforming massively.

For the moment, I can’t get my head around the level of investment, the number of businesses, the number of science parks, business parks and innovation centres, just to pick out a few key entities. It is a different world, in one city.