History

The early years | 1970-1980 | 1980-1990 | 1990-2000 | 21st century

The land where the Cambridge Science Park is located, on the north-eastern edge of the City of Cambridge, has belonged to Trinity College since its foundation by King Henry VIII in 1546. It was farm land until World War II when it was requisitioned by the US Army and was used to prepare vehicles and tanks for the D-Day landings in Europe. After the war, the site lay largely derelict and increasingly threatened by planning blight until the decision to develop it was taken in 1970.

The development was a response to a report by the Mott Committee, a special Cambridge University Committee set up under the Chairmanship of Sir Nevill Mott (then Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics) to consider an appropriate response from Cambridge to an initiative of the Labour government following its election in 1964. Whitehall had urged UK universities to expand their contact with industry with the objective of technology transfer and also to increase the payback from investment in basic research and an expansion in higher education, in the form of new technologies.

The Mott Committee, in its report published in 1969, recommended an expansion of 'science-based industry' close to Cambridge to take maximum advantage of the concentration of scientific expertise, equipment and libraries and to increase feedback from industry into the Cambridge scientific community.

Trinity College was impressed with the importance of these ideas. The College had a long tradition of scientific research and innovation from Sir Isaac Newton onwards and since it had a piece of land available, it decided to apply for planning permission to develop it as a science park, an idea born during the 50s in the USA where the first science park was established by Stanford University.

Next > The first decade - 1970-80