Cambridge - are you happy living there ?

[yellowrose]

Hello

I am thinking about moving to Cambridge with my 2.2 year old son. We are a multicultural family, so I just wanted anyone's view on what life in Cambridge is like.

I used to live and work in Oxford (in my youth !), so I imagine its a similar place, quite cosmopolitan because of the university ?

Does anyone know anything about the nurseries/primary schools there ? Are they very difficult to get into ?

Any views appreciated. Thanks I am sort of new to mumsnet !

Maaza,
did you go to Chesterton Community College?

yellowrose, the milton road primary school scored rather well on the latest league table . don't know the area unfortunately.

maazaa, where are you now?

Boogie, indeed I did........

maazaa and fez - thanks so much for the excellent and very informative posts ! So very very helpful like everyone else on this thread

I can see why you rave about the place, it is beautiful and historic and people seem very friendly there. We did view a 3-bed near Milton Road the other day, but the garden was very very small. I need something a bit bigger for my toddler to run around in !

We will look for more houses in the same area. I like the Milton Road area it looks fab. plus very close to river and parks and city centre. I am not the rural sort having grown up in big cities and capital cities most of my life, so defo. going to look for centre location.

I don't work, so the train station and commuting not an issue at the moment. I have a car, but I noticed that Cambridge city centre is just like Oxford, lots of one way systems and roads blocked and a real pain for parking spaces, so I guess I will have to get more active and start walking into town, something I actually avoid here in London !

maazaa - I am not planning on any more babies - but thanks for the maternity unit recommndation ! Good to know that there are still a few good units around the UK !

maazaa - thanks also for the email address. I will contact you soon, thanks for the help

have you looked at chesterton? friend of mine lives there and loves it and she walks into town every day. not central central but good exercise she says

There are some parts of Chesterton which are nice such as Milton Road, Gilbert Road, Chesterton Road but the bits I was referring to were Chesterton High Street and further along that path, Scotland Road, Edinburgh Road area which weren't so great.

maaza, we may have met each other before at CCC!

Cambridge city is much more expensive than the villages a couole of miles out, it is very mullti-cultural although this has been a slow process!!

I am Cambridge born and bred and lived in London for nearly 10 years, i still do think it is a very expensive city, as expensive as London. House prices are also getting as bad as London.

It is a beautiful city with lots to do but I want to move further up North!!

Forgot to add Hiya carribeanqueen and cazzybabs !!

Maaza, I grew up in Cambridge too! But it was in the sixties and seventies.

Nice to hear one of my old primary schools - Milton Road has such a good reputation. I was there in the early sixties.

Agree that Mill Road is and was a lively place - much more upmarket now - it was poverty stricken when I was a child - my family home was just near parkers piece in Warkworth Terrace.

I am really pleased to hear Cambridge is less insular than it was - I remember there being a lot of town versus gown snobbery and as a teenager and twentysomething, I found it cold and unfriendly compared to London - I moved to london when I was 22 years old. I do remember feeling very put off by the intellectural snobbery( students and university people) and chip on shoulder attitudes (townies) but suspect it has changed since the seventies as so many more people go to on college and further education.

hi yellow rose, cambridge is a great place to bring up children. I was brought up here and loved it. Milton road is a good area with easy access to town by foot or no. 1 bus, no. 1 also goes to the station if you are craving london town. On the multicultural question I lived in Hackney for several years and was a bit shocked when I moved back to Cambridge as it is very white in comparison. Having said that there is a mix of people/ languages/cultures, much of the mix is created by the university and language schools. Mill road is an area with a wider ethnic mix of permenant cambridge residents. For schools St. Philips is probably the most mixed school and the bad reputation is IMHO a load of tosh, it is a really caring school with an excellent anti bullying policy that they carry out. Good luck with moving and hope you find a lovely home in Cambridge.

Thanks everyone again for the fantastic info.

I live in one of the nicest parts of London (Finchley) but have had my car broken into twice in two years (god knows why it is a 13 year old car with a face off stereo I always remove -nothing inside worth stealing, unless you like toddler toys !). Have spends loads repairing door locks on car. A friend who lives up the road was mugged literally in front of her house at 10:30 pm one night when out alone.

What is crime like in Cambridge, in particular car crime ? I hope it is safer than here !!

i lived 15 miles away from cambridge for 20 years and have recntly moved house..and i miss the place!as others have said, there are undesirable areas of cambridge as you get with all cities,arbury being the place i would mention, however its on the outskirts of the city as you come in from histon.
speaking of which have you looked at the surrounding villages/
such as girton, gt shelford etc?

as far as car crime is concerned, there has been a steady decline in auto theft over the past 25 years in cambridge with east cambridge having the highest reported level of car crime and strawberry hill area having the lowest

As property prices in Cambridge itself are very high, a lot of the rougher, high crime areas of the city are on the outskirts - or(going on what I have been told) in some of the surrounding villages. Hence Drummer Street Bus Station and Christ's Pieces used to be a bit rough sometimes - gangs of teenagers waiting for busses home from Cambridge city centre, with time on their hands and some very odd people in strange conditions wandering around Christ's Pieces - but if you are used to London, this should not faze you.

space and tiger - thanks. Yes, I am sure the roughest places in Cambridge look like a walk in the park compared to the roughest places in London, of which there are many many and growing by the day

All my friends and family here have been victims of some sort of crime. My brother was left for dead about 20 years ago after he left a night club in the early hours of the morning in the West End - his pockets emptied by a big bloke who decided it would be a good idea to break a few ribs and his jaw while he was at it. He was in hospital for weeks. My sister has been forced out of her car and mugged in broad day light, etc, etc...

I am not a wimp, but the daily stories of crime here in London, even in the good areas (the bad people go into the good areas to steal and pester) worry me sick ever since my son was born over 2 years ago. London is expensive, dirty, noisey. I love the place for lots of other reasons (mainly cultural things) and consider it my spiritual home as I have been here for 15 years and loved studying at univeristy here in my early 20's, but life changes when you have a child to think about.

...and Sir Ian Blair tells us Lonodn is "safe enough to leave your doors open", eh, I don't think I will risk it thanks ! I guess Sir Blair's house must be safe enough to leave his doors open, as he is probably living in a mansion with huge grounds inhabited by big dogs and bodyguards. I live in a 2 bed flat with no alarm and don't have a dog with big teeth which is rather different !

I just feel it is time to leave.

Yellowrose, I also live in London and my husband and I have decided that we would like to move to somewhere like Cambridge before our expected baby (due in February) starts school.

We live in a very pleasant part of north London (Winchmore Hill) but we currently have a two-bedroomed house and would need to substantially increase our mortgage to upgrade to something bigger in the same area. We could afford to do this if I worked full-time once the baby is born, but neither hubby nor I are keen on this and childcare is prohibitively expensive. We both work for universities in London, but DH has a 1.5 hour journey each way to and from work (and that's if there are no problems with public transport) and doesn't want to spend the next 30 years in that position. My journey is just over an hour each way - it's OK, but like DH I feel it's two wasted hours a day that could be put to better use. Once we have the baby DH won't get home in the evenings until bedtime, so will have very little interaction with him/her during the week.

I think we both feel that we'd like a better quality of life and would like to bring our child up in a more rural setting - possibly a village outside of Cambridge - with a short drive to work. DH's job is quite specialised and he would need to work in one of the country's big research-focused universities. His salary would reduce by about £10K but our mortgage would be less and we would not be shelling out so much on travel.

For the moment (next 2-3 years) we will stay where we are as I won't be working and want to make sure I get my maternity entitlements, also my mum lives 2 minutes away and I know we'll rely on her support in the early years. We are not at all unhappy where we are, but we definitely want to spend less hours a day getting to and from work, and live in a smaller community where we could get to know a few people.