In the Lent Term of this year at the English Faculty’s Benson Gallery, my exhibition “ ‘Our Place’ the Cambridge of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath “ enjoyed a steady flow of visitors with many of the Cambridge great and good writing nice things in the Visitor’s Book. Thank you to Laura Moss, the librarian and her team for being so welcoming to a non-Cambridge University graduate. The exhibition space is normally held for graduates, post-graduates and alumni of the university, but Laura felt that what the exhibition had to offer was worth a risk with this Cambridge townee!Thank you too to my brother, Martin Bond of ‘Cambridge Diary’ fame for supplying me with some of the most stunning shots of the Newnham and Grantchester water meadows which are portrayed in Plath’s early poems and Hughes’s later Birthday Letters. Jeremy Bays of AWS Publishing was also generous with his permission for me to use his magnificent map of the area from the Mill Bridge to Grantchester.
I am now working on a radio programme on the area and also writing a kind of meta-thesis on the way my research also uncovered insights into my own childhood and development in that part of Cambridge.