In 2016, 73.8 per cent of voters in the university town of Cambridge voted to remain in the EU. It’s among the richest cities in the UK with a large international population, but according to a 2018 report from the Centre for Cities think tank, it’s also the most unequal. The night I arrive, there are many people sleeping in doorways along the old and beautiful streets.
At the market square, clothes stallholder Ian Mortlock is chatting to book stallholder Henry Hardinge. Hardinge's father, Hugh, and the family stall were immortalised in Clive James's book Latest Readings.
They both wince when I ask about Brexit. "It's a disaster area," says Mortlock. "I remember getting up the next morning thinking that it was all going to be okay."
What will happen tomorrow? “Nothing,” says Hardinge. “It’s in a year’s time that we’ll see any change ... I generally feel it’s going to make this country poorer.”
“We need immigrants,” says Mortlock. “My brother runs care homes in Bristol and he says we really need people to come here.” Then he wonders if Cambridge people are just out of touch. “In the recession in 2008 I worked in a vegetarian restaurant and we barely noticed a thing. I didn’t suffer.”
Marcin Rys came from Poland 15 years ago to work as a builder but started operating a bike stall here in 2010. "Brexit is a British decision," he says. "I'm disappointed but there's not much I can do. It does give you the feeling that you're not welcome."
Why did Britain vote to leave? “I think that there are a lot of people in Britain who feel very disappointed in a government that doesn’t work very well. And a lot of people who voted leave don’t know the world. They haven’t been outside their own gardens.”
What does he think will happen next? He says that he heard on Polish radio that there are 400,000 Poles without “settled status” in the UK. He’s among that number. “My dream is that they ask us to leave in one day, all of us, and then we leave. I’d love to see this country the next day. That will be a big eye-opener for leave voters.”
‘A bit racist’
Big Issue seller and ex-soldier Darren Goldrick lives in a tent in Stourbridge Common, "because I want to live as low impact a life as possible". He lives off wild game and last night, he tells me, he showed a friend how to prepare partridge and they made "partridge with shallots, mushrooms and red wine".
Of Brexit, he says: “We shouldn’t have had that vote. The economy will be in ruins. There’ll be no return to manufacturing. We’ll lose our banking sector. I think we’re in for a tough, tough time.”
Why does he think 17.5 million people voted to leave? “It seems a bit racist to me, a bit xenophobic. But that’s rife in this country. Brits don’t like other people much these days.”
English student Milly Corcoran is out distributing food to homeless people for a charity called Streetbite. She's the person who told me that Cambridge is among the most unequal places in Britain. As we're talking a very tired looking man stops to ask for a sandwich and a coffee.
"How many Cambridge students does it take to make a coffee?" quips Corcoran's fellow student Eli Nelson, as he and two others get it together. The man smiles.
Why do they think Britain voted to leave? "I think there was a lot of dissatisfaction and the Brexit vote represents that," says Rebecca Vincent, a student.
They all supported remain but they don’t talk about it much. “People don’t tend to talk about politics in college,” says Nelson. “Unless it’s part of an organised political discussion.”
All of them worry about the future. “It all feels like things are turning inwards, that we’re turning away from the international community,” says Corcoran.
Cambridge is the kind of place, says Nelson, where tomorrow “everyone will shut the doors and stay home crying”.
‘Take back control’
Andy is one of only two leave voters I meet in Cambridge. He’s an IT worker-turned-busker with a repertoire of 150 songs. “It’s the best job I ever had and the worst paid.”
Why did he vote leave? "Democracy. I didn't like the lack of accountability in Europe. I wanted us to take back control. That's not just a cliché."
He wasn’t surprised at the result. He knew there was a large silent leave vote, who, like him, would have been “reluctant to put a Brexit sticker on a car”. Why the reluctance? “Because the media associated the leave vote with xenophobia and racism.”
He's not racist, he says, but he believes that immigration has become a problem. Why? "Because I know plenty of people who were priced out of a job by someone from Romania who was happy to work for 50 quid a day."
I go into the Cambridge University Press Bookshop. There has been a bookshop on the site since the 1580s. Ian McConnell, a customer in the shop, advises me to read Hugo Young's This Blessed Plot. He quotes from it: "Britain has struggled for 50 years to reconcile a past it can't forget with a future it can't avoid."
I ask is if he’s an academic. “I’m a scientist,” he says. “I don’t know if you’d call that an academic ... I’m a retired professor of infectious diseases.” He laughs ruefully. “It’s a pity you can’t vaccinate people against Brexit.”
Why did Britain vote to leave? “Britain doesn’t do referenda very well,” he says. “You can’t put a single issue to a referendum like that.”
Cambridge voted remain, he says, because “there are no borders when it comes to knowledge”. As for Britain as a whole, “we just seem to flip from xenophobia to despair”.
