Eight free university museums, a modernist house hung with Alfred Wallis and Ben Nicholson, and a playhouse where the Footlights still take the stage at 23:00. This is Cambridge past the chapel queue: collections, studios and stages built by centuries of restless curiosity.
The university's art museum, founded on Viscount Fitzwilliam's 1816 bequest and opened in 1848 behind George Basevi's Corinthian portico. Egyptian coffins and Greek vases downstairs; Titian, Hogarth, Monet and Picasso upstairs. Tue–Sat 10:00–17:00, Sun from 12:00, closed Mon.
Jim Ede's four knocked-through cottages, left exactly as he arranged them in 1957: Gaudier-Brzeska bronzes, Ben Nicholson reliefs, Alfred Wallis ship paintings and a spiral of pebbles on a table. The adjoining gallery runs contemporary shows.
A 1930s stable and garage block converted in 2016 into Cambridge's sharpest small contemporary space, showing modern British and international work. It sits inside William Wilkins' 1807 Downing College — the first Greek Revival campus plan in Britain.
The commercial art strip: Cambridge Contemporary Art at 6 Trinity Street for printmakers and studio ceramics, Byard Art on King's Parade for figurative painting and small sculpture, with G. David's antiquarian bookshop tucked in St Edward's Passage.
Built in 1934 at the Scott Polar Research Institute as the national memorial to Scott's lost party, it holds their last letters and sledging flags alongside Inuit carvings and Franklin expedition relics. Tue–Sat 10:00–16:00.
Robert Whipple's 1944 gift of instruments, housed on Free School Lane in the old Cavendish Laboratory quarter: brass orreries, Elizabethan sundials, microscopes and early calculating machines in a timber-roofed former dining hall. Weekday afternoons only.
Founded 1884 on Downing Street, its Maudslay Hall is dominated by a Haida house pole from British Columbia rising through three storeys. Pacific material collected on Cook's voyages sits beside Fenland prehistory dug from the peat.
Britain's oldest university playhouse, on Park Street, and the home stage of the Cambridge Footlights — the alumni list runs from Peter Cook and John Cleese to Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry. Two shows most nights during term.
The city's folk museum since 1936, in the timber-framed White Horse Inn on Castle Street — a working pub for three centuries. Nine rooms of Fenland eel traps, printers' trays, chimney charms against witches and everyday townspeople's clutter.
Romsey Town's spine: Kurdish and Bangladeshi grocers, secondhand record shops and the Dales Brewery yard off Gwydir Street, now artists' studios and Hot Numbers Coffee, which puts on Sunday jazz sets under the old brewery beams.
The 1894 sewage pumping station on Cheddars Lane, kept intact with its Hathorn Davey beam engines, Babcock boilers and the destructor that burned the city's rubbish to raise steam. Volunteers fire the engines on advertised steaming days.
A back-room venue at 129 Chesterton Road that has run Cambridge's small-band circuit for decades — touring indie, folk and punk acts on a stage barely a foot high, plus comedy nights and open-mic sessions midweek.