15 July 2026

Beer and sandwiches: At the Mill in 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

One should always wear their education lightly. Status-signalling is ugly work. No one wins friends with heavy-handed references to their advanced intellect. And never forget: it is more gracious to show than tell. Anyway, this week Beer and Sandwiches is about a tiny little pub easily accessed from the back gate of Peterhouse college, Cambridge – one frequented for no particular reason by undergrads otherwise immersed in history or the classics.

Milling about

Inside, the Mill is dark, warreny and mothballed, and one always suspects a sinister academic to be lurking behind the corner with a knife. No, you must get out of there fast. Take your pint – plastic cup, sorry – and sit on the bridge that connects the River Cam to the Mill Pond, or loll about on the grass, Brideshead-ly. In the summer months you will have to share the real estate with grazing cattle, but they are usually magnanimous in disposition.

Don’t mind the view

As for the sandwiches department? It’s pub fare and we should all know by now that pub fare – sausage and mash, pie and mash, fish and chips – is for tourists and Americans. No, the Mill is for lager, cider and ale if you are so inclined, which your correspondent is not. Mostly one is here for the view – the best you will find in Cambridge. In the brief history of Beer and Sandwiches, you have never been recommended a better place to squander away a summer’s afternoon.

The Mill, Mill Lane, Cambridge