The Backs

The Backs refers to the landscape at the back of the colleges - offering some of the most spectacular and iconic views of the colleges.

They can be visited on foot or by punt.

It has not always looked like this.

The colleges spent 400 years buying up the land towards the river to clear it, as it had been full of wharves, granaries and animal grazing - before it became the iconic view it is today.

Fun fact : in 1776 the university paid "Capability" Brown, the most celebrated landscape gardener in England at the time, 50 pounds (a considerable sum) to redesign the whole of the Backs as a single park.

He delivered the plan three years later, but the Senate, the body of graduates that governed the university, turned it down - which is why the Backs are still a row of separate college gardens rather than one landscape.

Nine bridges cross the river along the Backs : the most famous within college grounds (Queens' Mathematical Bridge, Clare Bridge, the oldest, and St John's Bridge of Sighs).

Two are open to everyone : the Silver Street Bridge (looking down onto the Mathematical Bridge) and the Garret Hostel Bridge.

Fun fact : the Garret Hostel Bridge has one of the best views of Cambridge - and is also known as Orgasm Bridge, after the noises cyclists make going up one side and down the other!

A famous and really pleasant way to do the Backs is by punt - originally working boats on the Fen marshlands north of Cambridge.

In summer, it's even possible to order Pimm's from a floating punt-bar.

Fun fact : there are said to be two distinct ways to punt.

The "Cambridge way" involves standing on the till, with the flat deck at the back of the boat, while the "Oxford way" is to stand inside it!

Downstream from the Backs, on the River Cam, are the college and university boathouses.