A Cambridge day trip from London, the punting version

Day Guide · England · Cambridge

By Kat · 4 and 5 September 2026

Everyone has DNA. But did you know it was discovered in Cambridge? And you can sit at the table in the pub where it was announced.

Cambridge is the maths and the science. The halls of Trinity and the colleges, the pieces you learned about at school, the tree graft where Isaac Newton’s apple came from, then a drink at the Eagle where DNA was. All of it on foot, because the city is nice and compact and it’s never far to a feed.

Then the punt. You pole it yourself, it’s a lot harder than you anticipate and my running joke is to see how many people fall in. A bit of a drinking game if you’re a group.

Build the day around one anchor and let the rest go loose. Mine was the 10am Trinity tour.

This itinerary works all year. The only thing to swap in winter is the punt, for a walk along the Cam or the library. I haven’t done the library yet.

Put it on your list. It’s back on mine, because I just love walking around Cambridge, it’s so pretty. Next time another college, a picnic if the weather’s good and punting again with a few drinks on the water.

The day, mapped

Do the day in this order. It’s built by effort, not by the map. The Trinity tour is the one fixed time, so everything before it fits around 10am.

Leave the punt for the afternoon. You don’t want wet hands and a rush back to a college tour. Nothing here climbs, so the thing to manage is the clock and not your legs. The wine bar goes last, because you can’t start a day in a wine bar.

Getting there and in, by 9am

Aim to be off the train by 9am. That leaves half an hour to reach the centre before the bun and the tour.

Book the train before anything else. Ours was a Greater Anglia weekend ticket, out on the Friday and back any day up to the Monday, which came in slightly cheaper because we stayed over.

For a day trip you want an off-peak. The off-peak day return is £27. There’s a more flexible off-peak above that. Pick the off-peak that suits you if you want to choose your trains on the day. Take an advance if you’re happy to be tied to one train and want it a bit cheaper.

Doing it in a day is cheaper than it sounds. It’s about an hour on the fast train.

From the station it’s about a 30-minute walk to King’s College, or £6 to £10 in an Uber. There’s a bus as well. We never took it.

You can wing the rest. Only the college tour needs booking, plus the punt in high summer.

book the train and pick off-peak if you want your options open on times.

Breakfast on the go at Fitzbillies, 9:30

Take your bun and coffee away with you, because you can’t eat inside the college. Fitzbillies on Trumpington Street, right next to King’s, is the famous one for its Chelsea bun.

Skip the Chelsea bun if currants aren’t your thing. They aren’t mine, so I had the cinnamon and cream cheese icing bun at £4.25 with a £4 coffee.

You can order online if you’re worried they’ll sell out.

Trinity College tour, 10:00

Reserve the slot on Trinity’s own site, then pay £10 at the door. Card is fine and under-12s are free.

Go out of term if you get to pick your date. The college takes you into the hall instead of roping it off. That is where the Tudor stained glass is, kings and queens set into the windows above you. We got in.

Look up at the Great Gate on the way through. Henry VIII is holding a chair leg where his sceptre should be. I checked my photo and it’s still there. The story I’d always heard was students. Varsity tracked it down in 2010 to a window cleaner who found the hand empty and filled it. It never came out.

Clap once in Nevile’s Court and wait. Newton stamped his foot in the north cloister there to time the echo and work out the speed of sound. Someone on our tour did it and you could hear it come back. Do it.

Don’t plan on the Wren Library on a September Saturday. It opens Monday to Friday, 12 to 2, until its weekend season starts again on 3 October. Any weekday works.

If the Trinity slot has gone, a walking tour led by a former student covers the colleges from outside. I did one on an earlier trip. The facts overlap with the Trinity tour, so do one or the other, not both.

Take some of the guide’s patter as patter. Ours had Trinity owning the land under some Tesco stores and leasing the ground under the O2. Then the Byron story: the rules banned dogs and said nothing about bears, so he kept one. What is solid is the first female Fellow, elected in 1977. The hall was built between 1604 and 1605.

Newton’s apple tree, 11:00

Stand where the gravity story starts. Newton thought about gravity when an apple hit his head. This graft of that tree stands right next to Trinity, where he studied. His room is nearby. It is not the original tree. That one is at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire.

Bring a green apple for the photo. The real one is a cooking apple, hard to come by unless you go to a bigger shop. A green one is the best re-enactment you get, which is the shot below.

Craft market on Trinity Street, 11:10

Give it ten minutes between the gate and the Eagle, on a Saturday, because that’s the one day it runs. It’s the place for things you can only buy in England: jewellery made from old coins from £45 up, stamps, belts and college hoodies. I didn’t buy a thing and I was tempted twice.

The Eagle, 11:30

Head straight for the plaque table, where Crick and Watson announced the double helix on 28 February 1953. One visit, one drink, that’s all it needs.

Look up on the way to the bar. The silver eagle sits on the RAF Bar staircase and the ceiling above it is covered in wartime airmen’s names, burned in by candle.

Budget around £9 a glass here. We paid £18.60 for two glasses of Chapel Down white, an English wine in the pub where DNA was announced. The Eagle doesn’t take bookings from May to the end of September. Arriving at 11:30 is what gets you the table rather than a wait at the bar.

Lunch, pick one, 12:15

Pick one of these two. Both are a minute from the Eagle.

Bread and Meat, 4 Bene’t Street, for the chips. The roast vegetable ciabatta is £12 and the poutine side is £7.50, beef gravy, not vegetarian. I ate it anyway. It was the star of the day.

Order the bowl at £19.50 if you’re hungrier, which is what I wish I’d done instead of the sandwich. Service is 12.5% on top. One plain note: the cheese curds are unpasteurised, so flag it for anyone who needs to know.

Butch Annie’s, 23 Market Street, for a burger. The Ooh La La veg burger is £11. The peppercorn saucy chips are £7.50, made with beef dripping. I ate them knowing that. Two schooners of Rex lager were £5.50 each. Two of us came to £50.06 with 12.5% service.

Go here for the independence and the concept, both of which they have put real effort into. The patty just wasn’t my preference. If you eat meat you’ll likely rate it higher than I did.

The Backs, on foot, 13:30

Walk the Backs after lunch and you get King’s College from the meadow, which is the actual postcard shot and better than the street view.

Don’t build the walk around the cows. A friend’s list promised us grazing from April to October. We walked Coe Fen and the Backs on the Saturday and found plenty of evidence of cows and not a single cow.

The punt, 14:30 to 16:30

Pick your version of this first. Hire a boat yourself and bet on who falls in. Or take a guided tour and get chauffeured around, which is a lovely way to do it.

Hire self-service from Trinity Lane, from Trinity College and GHL Punts. Self-hire is the one I did. The chauffeured boats go from the same dock. The table below has both, with what each one costs.

Get the story right before you repeat it under there. The Mathematical Bridge was designed in 1748 by William Etheridge and built in 1749 by James Essex. The tale that it went up without bolts is a nice one. Newton died twenty-two years before it was built.

It’s £24 for the hour. They hold a photo ID as the deposit rather than taking payment up front, so you pay on return. No advance booking, first come first served, season Good Friday to the end of October, Saturday and Sunday 10 to 6.

Get there before the rush. We arrived about 2:40 and waited around an hour, because we turned up just as it came in and took out all the boats. We were on the water by about 3:20 to 3:30, for the hour.

Option	Cost	For two	Catch
Self-hire, Trinity Lane	£24 an hour	£12 each	You do the poling
Chauffeured, same dock, or a guided punting tour	£25pp, 45 minutes	£50	Self-hire for two is under half this. The guided tour says no drinks on board
Pimm’s from the river boat	£12.60 a pint	£25.20 for two	Comes to more than the boat did
Mill Lane (Scudamore’s) guided tours	£78 up to three, £144 up to six	worse value at two	The tours do go past the famous colleges. It’s the self-hire from Mill Lane that runs the other way
The Prezzo end of the river	the cheapest, according to a friend who lives in Cambridge	not checked	We never made it up that way, so that’s his word, not mine

Carry your own drinks on board, because you can when you self-hire. Wine, anything. The guided tours say no drinks. I wish we had, because when a boat selling Pimm’s came alongside we bought two pints at £25.20. Lovely. Also £12.60 a pint.

In peak summer, budget that queue in or book at a dock that does take bookings. Accept you may not get the Trinity Lane price.

They show you how to pole it, then you go whichever way you fancy. We punted ourselves, one on the pole, one on the photos. It’s a lot harder than you anticipate, so count your crashes and make a drinking game of it. The Bridge of Sighs at St John’s is the one you’ll want from the water.

Jack’s Gelato and Market Square, 16:30

Cool off with something cold and walk it through Market Square. Jack’s Gelato on Bene’t Street does a cup for £4.90, which is what I had.

Go for the iced tea instead if you’d rather. The Bubble Bliss stall on Market Square does one for £4, cheap against London prices. I had that too.

See what the square is doing while you’re there. We got Morris dancers on the Saturday, which was luck and not a plan.

King’s College and the wine bar window, 17:00

Get your postcard shot outside the Chapel first. Tickets are about £18 on a weekend to go round on your own. Or a guided tour of King’s walks you through it, the way the Trinity one does. Book ahead either way, because the early-bird price on the college’s own ticket closes every Sunday night for the week ahead.

Finish at Cambridge Wine Merchants on King’s Parade, the way we did both days. Take the window seat if it’s free, or a table outside if you’re lucky. It sits on the main walkway down to King’s, so it’s proper people-watching with the Chapel in view the whole time.

Order the mystery glass, 175ml. We had the red on Friday at £12 and the white on Saturday at £10. Every bottle on the list has its own label with the winemaker and the region on it, which is exactly my kind of thing. If you’re travelling with wine-club people, bring them here.

Sit until your train if you want to. They’re open to 9pm on a Friday and Saturday. They also pour an English one, Flint Vineyard Bacchus from Norfolk at £10 a glass. Ours was the 6pm home.

If you stay the night

Stay over for a slower morning and a proper dinner. We had the Hobson, 42 to 44 St Andrew’s Street, a former police station with POLICE still carved above the door. £142.68 for the Friday night for two, £71.34 each.

Book somewhere on the decor and you might get what I got. Mine was an Australian hotel. I didn’t clock that until the koala turned up in the bar. Early check-in was quoted at £30 and we said no. We left the bags and went for lunch instead.

The bar downstairs, Oz & Isle, does a Gold Rush at £14 and a no and low option at £11. That’s drinks only. I can’t tell you anything about the food there.

For dinner, Tradizioni at 18 The Broadway. It was our anniversary, so I’d put that on the booking the way you would for a birthday, with no expectations. They had read it. We were wished happy anniversary on the way in. There was a glass of prosecco each waiting. The whole team said it again on the way out.

Order what you actually want. I asked for pasta and ordered the aubergine lasagne, which is not the same thing. Tiramisù is £8.50 and the menu prints it as a UK Italian Awards finalist. Pizza runs £9.90 to £19.90 and pasta is about £20, written loosely because we didn’t keep the bill. Uber from the hotel both ways.

What I’d cut if it runs late

Cut the market and the gelato first. They’re the softest part of the day and nothing hinges on them.

Next goes the wine bar at the end, lovely but skippable if you’re chasing a train. Never cut the Trinity tour or the punt. Everything else in the day exists to protect those two.

The rain plan

Move indoors and salvage it. Our Friday was the cold one. We gave up on the afternoon and sat in the wine bar window with a red. Checked in at three, warm in the hotel until dinner.

Day-trippers have the Fitzwilliam Museum, free, no booking needed, Tuesday to Saturday 10 to 5 and Sunday 12 to 5. I haven’t been, so that’s a pointer rather than something I’m telling you to do.

Ask about a deal on the punt while you’re at it. The companies are quieter on a grey day.

FAQ