Cambridge

Punts glide beneath the Bridge of Sighs and past the Wren Library while students cycle the cobbles in gowns, and the whole performance has repeated itself with minor variations since the thirteenth century. Cambridge is a university city where genius is the baseline and the river is the stage.

Cambridge University, founded in 1209, spreads thirty-one colleges through the city, many opening their courts and chapels to visitors. King's College Chapel, finished in 1515, holds the largest fan-vaulted ceiling in the world with Rubens' Adoration of the Magi over the altar — its Christmas Eve carols reach millions by broadcast but seat only a thousand. The Backs run college lawns down to the Cam in England's most photographed academic landscape, and punting upstream to Grantchester crosses the water meadows Rupert Brooke immortalised. The Fitzwilliam Museum — Egyptian sarcophagi, Impressionists, medieval manuscripts — is world-class and entirely free, while the Wren Library keeps Newton's own Principia behind glass. Fitzbillies has sold its sticky Chelsea buns since 1922, the city's most beloved institution after the university itself.