6 May 2026

Beer and sandwiches: At the Granta, Cambridge

This column is our weekly pub review, written by pintsmen, women and children across the nation. Suggestions to letters@newstatesman.co.uk

By New Statesman

Illustration by Marta Signori

There are two “Grantas” in the life of the thinking man or woman. There is Granta, the leading literary journal in the Anglophone world, which published the early William Empson, and is now helmed by the redoubtable Thomas Meaney. Then there is the Granta, Cambridge’s noblest, warmest and most picturesque watering hole.

The pub hunkers over a pitstop in the the River Cam, the junction known as “Mill Pond” where punts and punters alike gather. And its terrace is open to the riverside, baking in the spring sunshine and freezing in the winter, when cold winds blow over the flat, unbreaking Fens.

Pubby displays of affection…

The pub is also a known hive of romance for even the most unlikely students of the town. I wish I could say that my most abiding memory of the place is of hot intellectual dispute, relitigating the intentional fallacy and revisiting IA Richards. Alas, I must confess to a lower though still aspirationally scholarly memory: my single appearance on the Facebook page – I believe it’s still operational – known as “Crushbridge”. This is where the lonely hearts of Cambridge could post their desperate, anonymous missives. And here, one chilly February, appeared a note dedicated to someone “talking about Roman law in the Granta last night”.

… and of affectation

I checked my hangover – beery, and clearly pub-fermented. I checked my memories of my conversation the previous evening, in which some discussion of the Justinian Code had indeed featured, recycled from my weekly reading. Reader – ’twas I.