Cambridge Icons
Travel with us to Cambridge to meet our Blue Badge Guide and to visit one of the UK’s newest architectural treasures – the Cambridge Eco Mosque which was designed by David Marks and shortlisted for the 2021 RIBA Stirling Prize for Architecture. We then head to the heart of Cambridge to buy lunch which will include the free time option to visit the “greatest little museum in the world”. The Fitzwilliam Museum is a glittering jewel in the crown of the University of Cambridge. We round off our day with one last visit to a Cambridge icon – the Orchard Tea Rooms in Grantchester for a cream tea – weather permitting in the garden beneath the fruit trees.
Date
01/08/2023
About this excursion
£92 per person
We meet a top notch Blue Badge Tour Guide at 10.30am at one of the UK’s newest architectural treasures – the Cambridge Eco Mosque.
There will be time for morning refreshments at the Mosque (included) before being taken on a
guided tour. Worshippers and visitors (all are welcome, men and women of all faiths) enter via the Islamic garden before passing through a covered portico and then an atrium, preparing them gradually for the contemplation of the prayer hall, facing Mecca. This combination of gardens with whispering fountains and vaulted prayer spaces has been used to great effect throughout Islamic history – for instance, at the Alhambra in Granada.
Designed by David Marks – the architect behind the London Eye and the treetop walkway at Kew Gardens, thirty columns, or ‘trees’, reach up to support the roof in an interlaced octagonal lattice vault structure inspired b y the English Gothic fan vaulting of nearby Kings College Chapel. The architect has aimed to build what he termed a “British Mosque”, also incorporating yellow Cambridge brick and architecture inspired by Victorian railway stations. The building is an Eco-Mosque, constructed to run on as little fuel as possible, to recycle rainwater, to make maximum use of natural light and to harness the power of the sun. The building was shortlisted for the 2021 RIBA Stirling Prize for Architecture.
On leaving the Mosque we head to the heart of Cambridge to break for time to buy lunch which will include the free time option to visit the “greatest little museum in the world”. The Fitzwilliam Museum is a glittering jewel in the crown of the University of Cambridge. Designed by the architect George Basevi it is widely considered to be one of the finest museum interiors in Britain.
The Fitz’s grandest gallery has re-opened to the public after a refurbishment project lasting two years. Jane Munro, director of the gallery’s refurbishment, said: “There is a completely new wall covering, which we all think makes the works of art sing”. Seeing paintings by Anthony Van Dyck, Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Lawrence in this room, makes great masterpieces truly unforgettable. A huge amount of detail has gone into this – the colour of the paint, the colour of the braiding, the painting of the kickboards. The plasterwork in the ceiling, which is one of the most astonishing museum interiors anywhere, has been cleaned, freshened up and painted in parts, and you can see all the crisp detail.
We round off our entertaining day out with one last visit to a Cambridge Icon – the Orchard Tea Gardens in Grantchester. For over 700 years, students such as Newton, Darwin, Cromwell, Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Marlow and Spenser have walked, ridden or boated from Cambridge to Grantchester Village. Once best known for the Old Vicarage and Rupert Brooke’s Stands the clock at ten to three, Granchester is now also recognised the world over for the erudite and eponymous detective drama.
The Orchard was first planted in 1868. One late spring mornin
g in 1897, a group of Cambridge students asked Mrs Stevenson, of Orchard House, if she would serve them tea beneath the blossoming fruit trees, rather than, as usual, on the front lawn of her house. So began a great Cambridge tradition. In taking tea at the Orchard, you are joining an impressive group of luminaries including Rupert Brooke, Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Alan Turing, Ernest Rutherford and Stephen Hawking.
If you’re game you can enjoy your Cream Tea from a deck chair but you’ll be pleased to know that the potentially embarrassing, if not life changing prospect of liberating yourself from a deck chair is not compulsory as they reserve a room full of tables and proper chairs, which also makes us blessedly weather proof. We’ll be ready to make tracks for home at 4.45pm.
The cost of this event includes luxury coach transport, your tour with a Blue Badge Guide, entry to the Eco-Mosque and your cream tea at the Orchard Tea Rooms + Travel Treats escorts and treats.
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