When I moved to Cambridge last October, it was just meant to be for a couple of months. As a born-and-raised Londoner, I never thought I’d be able to escape the gravitational pull of the capital for very long. I’ve lived in Cambridge once before, as an undergraduate, but couldn’t wait to leave. Now, for various reasons, I’m still here. The slower, quieter life of a smaller city seems to suit me. Besides, I can always hop on the train – less than an hour to King’s Cross – if I need to.
Sometimes, though, I’ve found myself wishing for a little more activity. There’s no independent cinema and I’ve already lost count of my visits to the (usually very good) permanent collection and exhibitions at the Fitzwilliam Museum and house and gallery at Kettle’s Yard. I enjoyed a visit to the David Parr House, with its carefully restored Arts and Crafts interiors, but it’s not easy, or cheap, to secure a timed slot.
It was with real excitement, then, that I received the news of two contemporary art spaces opening in Cambridge within two months of each other. Partial Versions is a non-profit exhibition programme organised by Amy Jones and Josh Lowe in the couple’s home, a rented Victorian cottage on a terraced street a short walk from the main train station. They launched in July with a show by the Berlin-based artist Tiphanie Kim Mall. In the living room, a monitor above the fireplace screened a film recorded in that same room the week before. All on the Same Page (2025) is a scripted re-enactment of a real – and at times quite tense – meeting that took place in an artist-led project space that Mall co-founded in Berlin a few years ago. It is by turns very stressful and very funny.
At a lunch to celebrate the opening – a delicious roast lamb with salsa verde, white beans and fennel salad – I sat opposite C.J. Mahony, an artist living in Cambridge with a studio at Wysing Arts Centre, a site for residencies, events and commissions in rural south Cambridgeshire. In 2011 Mahony co-founded Aid & Abet, another artist-run project space in an old railway warehouse near the station. During our conversation, I realised I’d reviewed one of their shows for a student newspaper. We laughed over my having referred to the space as on the ‘outskirts’ of Cambridge. But Aid & Abet has been inactive since 2018. On the challenges of sustaining an art scene in the city, Mahony observes: ‘Cambridge has international standing in biomedical research and tech and a lot of wealth, but also extreme financial inequalities and high cost of living, which is not ideal for artists.’
The programme at Partial Versions, Jones explains to me, is being funded on a show-by-show basis. (Mall’s show was thanks to an unnamed patron; the next exhibition, by Madrid-based artist Esther Gatón, is supported by the Spanish embassy.) There are also plans to start up a writing group. ‘I’m someone who massively benefited from artist-led project spaces,’ says Jones. ‘We need these spaces of experimentation outside of institutional and commercial models.’ The choice to set up stall in Cambridge was partly motivated by Jones and Lowe’s move here just over a year ago – Jones works full-time as a curator at Wysing. But they also noticed a particular lack in their new city. As Jones puts it: ‘A lot of the cultural activity is tied to the university.’
It’s true: both the Fitz and Kettle’s Yard are part of the University of Cambridge. Many colleges have strong art collections and a couple are even home to small exhibition spaces – the Heong Gallery at Downing, for instance, which recently closed a show of 1970s paintings by Gillian Ayres. The art history faculty organises talks and seminars with big-name artists and academics. These are all open to the public, but only if you know how to find them. ‘That’s something people often say about Cambridge, that the university is a bit closed,’ says Harriet Loffler, curator of the Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College – the largest collection of women-only art in Europe, amassed almost entirely through donations. ‘You do have to be slightly in the know, and have a bit of confidence, to say, “I’ll go to that.”’ (The first time I tried to visit the Women’s Art Collection, I couldn’t work out how to get in. The second time, I was impressed.)
Taking a different tack is Jeremy Parker, who is opening a new commercial gallery in the city in September. Parker lives in Saffron Walden, 15 miles south of Cambridge; until recently he commuted to London, where he was a director at Project Native Informant, a gallery in Bethnal Green. ‘It’s always been a goal of mine to have my own space. When I started thinking about it more seriously, I was drawn to the idea of doing something outside of London,’ Parker tells me. The gallery’s name, CORPUS, plays on the nearby Corpus Christi College. It also lends its title to the first show: a group exhibition featuring six artists ‘who are interested in or explore the body in their practice’. Work by Mahony are on view alongside the rising-star painter Joseph Yaeger and the late Italian photographer Lisetta Carmi (until 20 October).
A key motivating factor for Parker was rent. In London, he would have been looking at a small space in the south or east of the city. ‘When I weighed that up against what I could get in Cambridge, it was a bit of a no-brainer,’ he says. Parker recently showed me around the gallery-in-progress: an impressively spacious site with two adjoining rooms on a nice street just a couple of minutes’ walk away from Market Square in central Cambridge. Parker is also excited, he tells me, about the expanded role that a gallery can play ‘outside of a major centre’ – as a kind of local hub not just for artists but also musicians, writers and so on. One of the effects of a smaller arts scene, I’ve noticed, is that people from different disciplines tend to stick together.
And yet it seems it’s not entirely possible to split from the capital. Parker has made plans, he tells me, to take part in the 2026 edition of Condo London, an annual event in which galleries in host cities open up their spaces to galleries from other cities. Corpus will make a trip to Phillida Reid, just off Shaftesbury Avenue. In terms of the potential audiences for the gallery itself, he says: ‘There’s a lot that Cambridge has to offer for people to come and visit, and its proximity to London makes it very easy. It’s an attractive place, I think, for a day trip.’ A few curators, advisers and clients have already dropped by. Maybe some of them, as I was, will be tempted to stay a little longer.
