Down Your Street, Cambridge Past & Present: Volume 1 Central Cambridge

Pevensey Press. Very Good. 1983. Large Format Paperback. Sm 4to 0907115160 Large Format Paperback. Numerous Period Photographs. 176 pages clean and tight. This book brings together the articles on central Cambridge from Sara Payne's popular weekly newspaper series, Down Your Street. The novel form of research she has adopted combines oral testimony, documentary records and photographic evidence to reveal the identity of the individual streets that make up a city. While there are many accounts of this historic place that concentrate on either town or gown, Sara Payne gives equal attention to both, and shows their interdependence. Drawing on civic and collegiate archives, on newspapers and street directories of previous decades, and on the recollections and anecdotes of local residents and employees - college servants, shopkeepers, dons, businessmen, archivists, stallholders - she has accumulated a wealth of sharply focused detail, much of it hitherto unpublished in hook form. Her entertaining record of Cambridge past and present, generously illustrated with photographs old and new (many of which have been taken specially for the series), has already been enthusiastically received in thousands of Cambridgeshire homes, and is being made available in book form in response to popular demand. It will appeal to all who have a general interest in local history, and for all lovers of Cambridge - those who are visiting for the first time, those who know it well, and those who live and work there - it affords unique and fascinating insight into the city's way of life. Sara Payne, who comes from a family of artists and craftsmen, was horn in Gloucestershire and graduated from Edinburgh University. Her father was a publisher, and she trained as a journalist with Times Newspapers Ltd, working for three years on the Times Educational Supplement before coming to Cambridge in 1970. Here she has established herself as a well-known local journalist and broadcaster. Her continuing Down Your Street series began in the Cambridge Weekly News in 1981. Sara Payne is married to David Weigall, a lecturer in history at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology, and they have two children. .