The Backs
The Backs is the long green corridor where Cambridge's oldest colleges meet the River Cam on their western side — lawns rolling down to the water, stone bridges arching overhead, and the fan-vaulted silhouette of King's College Chapel rising behind it all. The view from the riverbank is one of the most photographed in England, and it earns that attention.
Access is more layered than it looks from the outside. The footpath along Queen's Road gives you the western edge for free, but the riverbanks themselves sit within college grounds, so getting close to the bridges means either paying college entry fees or taking to the water by punt.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to time it for early morning in late spring — the light is low, the tour groups haven't arrived, and the cow parsley is out along the banks. Clare Bridge, built in 1639 and studded with decorative stone balls, photographs best from the water. If you're walking, the stretch between Trinity and Clare is the one to linger on.
Deals in The Backs
Book directly at the providerHow The Backs came to be
The land behind Cambridge's colleges was pasture and orchard for centuries, crossed by wooden bridges and owned piecemeal by the colleges that backed onto the Cam. The transformation into something more deliberate happened in the 1760s and 1770s, when the floodplain was turfed into lawns and the area acquired the name it still carries.
In 1772, St John's College brought in Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, the leading landscape architect of the era, to lay out a 'wilderness' on the college side of Queen's Road — it survives. Seven years later Brown presented a grander unified plan for the whole stretch, centred on King's College's Gibbs Building, but it was never executed. The colleges each pursued their own visions instead. Historic England designated The Backs a Grade I Historic Park and Garden in 1995, and in 2007 landscape architect Robert Myers completed a new management strategy commissioned by six of the colleges.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Cambridge runs cool and damp through most of the year — winters are grey and raw, with January temperatures hovering just above freezing. Late spring through early autumn is the practical window for visiting; June to August brings mild days in the low twenties Celsius, though summer can surprise you with sharp heat or a sudden afternoon shower in equal measure.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.