This walk is like a leaf blown on the wind. It moves where the wind takes it, shifting with the currents of the city, following the paths that remain and tracing the ghosts of those that have disappeared. There is no fixed route, only the pull of memory, of forgotten cut-throughs, of places once known and now lost.
Peterborough is a city that never quite arrives. It has been built and rebuilt, its past erased and rewritten, but never with a coherent vision. It is a place of fragments: medieval, industrial, New Town, post-industrial, suburban sprawl. A city where history has not so much accumulated as been periodically discarded, each new phase of development treating what came before as a mistake to be corrected. Its geography reflects this, disjointed and compartmentalised, a place where movement is channelled and controlled.
Beneath the modern city, there is another map, one of medieval origins, where the streets twisted outwards from the market square, their names heavy with use. Cowgate, Westgate, Midgate: roads that spoke of function and movement, of trades and cattle, of a city that grew around its cathedral. Some of it still exists, but other parts are imagined now, spectres of streets erased by the planners’ hands. When Queensgate was built in the early 1980s, much of this street pattern was severed. The market lost its connective tissue. The flow of the city was redirected. A Situationist dérive through Peterborough is not just an act of resistance but an exercise in frustration. There are routes you cannot take, streets that no longer exist, ghost spaces that linger in old maps but not in the city itself.
Peterborough’s surface is only part of the story. Beneath the streets, beneath the cathedral and the Guildhall, beneath the stone foundations of Milton Hall, there are whispers of tunnels. A secret network, they say, running below the city, linking its most powerful sites. A passageway for monks slipping unseen through the night. A hidden route for prisoners taken from the Guildhall’s cells, led underground to places unknown. The truth is harder to pin down, drainage channels mistaken for escape routes, forgotten cellars repurposed by myth. But the stories persist. The idea that something still moves beneath us, out of sight.
And maybe it does. Some claim a lost river flows below Peterborough, buried but never gone. A slow, unseen current running beneath the streets, beneath Queensgate, beneath the layers of history that have built up above it. The city was shaped by water, rivers, drainage dykes, channels carved through the land, and maybe one of them still lingers underground, its course hidden, its presence only guessed at.
This is a place of water. The wet fen, once untamed, held back by ditches and embankments. The Nene, still flowing, still central, even as roads and railways try to render it an afterthought. Ferry Meadows, a name that hints at the crossings that once were, when the river was not just a boundary but a route, a way of moving through, rather than a thing to be crossed over and forgotten.
Even now, movement through the city is never straightforward. Bus travel in Peterborough is an exercise in patience or futility. A journey rarely takes you where you need to go directly. Routes loop, double back, demand a detour before finally depositing you somewhere close to where you intended. Not early, not late, just inconvenient. The logic feels designed to make you give up and take the car. Cycling should be an alternative, but the cycle lanes are lined with broken glass, paths of slow deflation. Better to brave the roads, take your chances with traffic, than risk a puncture and walk your bike home.
Peterborough has always been a place of migration. Maybe it is the wind, blowing people in its direction, or maybe it is just how cities like this work, places on the edge of something else, never quite belonging to one thing or another. Different peoples, at different times. Eastern Europeans after the war, the displaced persons, as they were called, Poles, Ukrainians, remnants of a continent reshuffled by conflict. Then came the Indians, the Pakistanis, the shopkeepers, the taxi drivers, the mill workers. But Peterborough’s version was different. No dark, satanic mills here. A clothes factory on Bamber Street, where Asian women worked at their sewing machines, finishing garments for Marks & Spencer, or was it British Home Stores or C&A. Different machinery, different industry, but the same long shifts, the same quiet endurance. Later, the freedom of movement years, when Portuguese voices joined the mix, and more Eastern Europeans arrived, taking up jobs in the factories and warehouses. Then the wars on terror, sending Kurds, Afghans, Iraqis, each carrying with them a different history of displacement. Peterborough has always been a melting pot, but never brought to a simmer, never at boiling point. A place where lives are stacked next to each other, close but not always connected.
My first haircut in a barber’s. Blond boyish curls reduced to a shaved head, a shaved head to match my military green jumper. The only haircut Stan gave boys. A proper haircut for boys. The clippers buzzing, the chair too big, feet swinging above the floor. The mirror showing a different version of myself, unfamiliar, older. Stan asking the men if they wanted “something for the weekend.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew the smell, talc and aftershave, warm air, the scent of something grown-up. The door swinging shut behind us, the cold air hitting bare scalp, the realisation of loss.
Millfield, once a second-tier shopping district, an alternative to the city centre, has drifted into another kind of limbo. Too many bookies now, too many fast food places, the kind of high street that doesn’t encourage lingering. But something is shifting. Portuguese cafés have appeared, small tables and chairs set outside on the pavement, a kind of street life unfamiliar in an English city that prefers to keep its social spaces indoors. Is this the slow emergence of a continental identity, or just a Covid throwback, a habit formed in necessity and now left hanging? The city doesn’t quite know.
Somewhere here, in childhood memory, unreliable, maybe, it was winter, and a motorcyclist hit ice. A slow-motion slip, the bike spinning out from beneath him, machine and man parting ways, disappearing in different directions. Was it Millfield or just the mind pulling in another street, another day, one remembered detail stitched to another? The city holds these small, unclaimed moments, just as it holds the things it loses.
To the east, the factories still dominate, though fewer now than before. Fengate was always the city’s working heart, its industrial belt running along the river and out towards the bypass. This was where generations found steady work, including your father. The shifts were long, the jobs repetitive, but they gave a shape to the city’s days, a rhythm of clocking in, clocking out, walking home through streets blackened by brick dust.
Not everything was routine. On 22 March 1989, a van loaded with fireworks caught fire in an industrial yard. Firefighters arrived quickly, expecting a standard blaze. They did not know about the explosives inside. When the blast came, the force tore through the yard and into the street. John Humphries, a firefighter standing just fifteen metres away, was killed instantly. Over a hundred people were injured. The sky lit up with fire and debris, an inferno erupting in the middle of the everyday. A plaque now marks the site, though few passersby stop to read it. The factories carry on, the roads still hum with lorries, but the city has already forgotten.
Further south, another piece of the city’s past has slipped away. The greyhound track once stood near the river, tucked behind the warehouses and car parks, a space outside the city’s main circuits. Opened in 1931, it outlasted the old industries, surviving decades of slow decline. It was a place of cheap beer, cigarette smoke, small wagers and, occasionally, the thrill of an unexpected win. Your mum remembers her dad cycling home from the dogs, weaving across the road, the cold Fenland air sharp on his face, the smell of beer and losing bets clinging to his clothes. One more drink than intended, one more losing streak, the slow ride home under the sodium lights, passing factories still humming with night-shift work. But the track is gone now, the land levelled.
Another erasure: Walton Comprehensive. A school that outgrew itself. The original front still there, but then new additions, a language block, a science block, English and art, still not enough, mobiles lined up in rows, overspill classrooms that became permanent. The sports hall, the newest part, but no pool. One or the other, not both. The whole place stitched together with covered walkways that caught the rain but not the wind. A place of detentions and fights, of learning and wishing the day to end. Gone now. Knocked down, replaced by a purpose-built academy, streamlined, modern, a fresh start. Was it PFI? Perhaps. A school built for a different kind of logic.
Only London Road remains, the home of Peterborough United, but even that feels precarious. The Posh have played here since the 1930s, their stadium a rare continuity in a city that discards its past too readily. The floodlights still glow over the south bank of the river, the stands still shake when the team scores, but for how much longer? Plans for a new stadium, more modern, more commercially viable, threaten to uproot the club, leaving London Road to the developers, to high-rise flats and retail units. Another erasure in waiting.
Beyond the city centre, Peterborough’s outer districts stretch towards the fields, places built with different dreams. The Ortons were meant to be balanced, modern homes set against parkland and water, an escape from the old industrial grime. The planners imagined communities shaped by open space, public art, civic pride. Some of it remains, but much of it has faded. The crescents and walkways, designed to foster community, are often just shortcuts for those with nowhere to be.
Further north, the Welland estate was built quickly, cheaply, without the utopian flourishes. It has the air of a place never quite meant to last. It was here, in 1994, that six-year-old Rikki Neave was murdered, a crime that lingers in the alleyways and rat-runs, another stain on the city’s unresolved geography.
Even before Queensgate, there was always something unresolved about Peterborough. It is a city without hills, without inclines, a flatland that gives way too easily to the wind. It moves unchallenged across the Fens, gathering force before funnelling down Bridge Street, rattling bus shelters and sending litter spinning into eddies. There is nothing to break its momentum, no high ground to interrupt its passage. The sky is vast, pressing down on the city with a strange, weightless emptiness.
In the outer districts, that wind takes on a different character, whistling between the failed utopias of the New Town estates.
Further south, Hampton emerges from the ruins of the old brick pits. A suburb built from scratch, a synthetic town rising from an industrial void. Its lakes and retail parks attempt to manufacture a sense of place, but it is the kind of place that must be constantly maintained, polished, kept from slipping back into the emptiness that preceded it.
Only Castor still holds its past intact. The Romans built here, and their presence lingers. The Saxon church was raised on their ruins, built partly with Roman bricks scavenged from the remains of Durobrivae, the great settlement that once dominated the Nene Valley. The church became the shrine of St. Kyneburga, daughter of King Penda of Mercia, who renounced her royal life to found an abbey here. Pilgrims came to seek her blessing, walking the same paths that Roman soldiers once patrolled. The walls that enclose the churchyard are built from the remains of one of the largest Roman buildings in Britain, a praetorium that would have stood high above the water meadows, surveying the land for miles. Unlike Peterborough, Castor does not erase itself. It does not discard its past but builds upon it. Maybe this is a kind of renovation I can get behind. Not totally erased, not smoothed into something unrecognisable, but layered, carrying its past forward rather than burying it.
They came digging for it again. Time Team arrived in 2011, picking over the same Castor earth that had been turned centuries before, following in the footsteps of Edmund Artis, the antiquarian who first uncovered the scale of Roman Castor. Artis, steward to the Fitzwilliam family, spent the 1820s excavating what he believed to be a Roman palace—the praetorium—mapping out hypocausts, mosaic fragments, and foundations of a building vast in scale. But after his work was done, the trenches were filled, the stones reclaimed, the site returned to fields. Another ghost trail, left beneath the surface.
Artis himself remains here, buried upright in the churchyard, as if still surveying his lost excavation. Looking out over what he once uncovered, what he once documented, before it was covered again, reclaimed by time and the land. The diggers come and go, each generation chasing the same outlines, tracing over the same ground. But the past in Castor does not stay buried. It rises, again and again.
The Romans returned in the 1970s, though this time in the form of Roy Kinnear, his broad, comic features beaming from television screens, dressed in a centurion’s tunic. His role was to sell Peterborough’s New Town dream, a future of clean streets and open spaces, motorways and shopping centres. But not everyone came from the future. Many of the workers who built modern Peterborough arrived from Italy, drawn by the promise of the brickyards. They worked in the pits, firing the clay that would expand the city, building homes they would never live in. The kilns burned through the decades, then went cold, and now their children and grandchildren remain, woven into the city’s fabric.
They found him buried in Fenstanton, too far for this walk, but then distance is only space, and time stretches differently when the past refuses to stay buried. A skeleton, almost lost in the soil, the first found in Britain to bear the unmistakable marks of crucifixion. A nail through the heel, pinned to wood. No ceremony, no marker, just a body left in the earth.
Who was he? A runaway slave, a bandit, an agitator the Romans decided needed to serve as a warning? Or was he simply unlucky, caught in the indifferent machinery of imperial punishment? Fenstanton sat along the Via Devana, the great Roman road linking Colchester and Chester, a place of movement, of soldiers, of commerce. The legions passed through, traders passed through, law passed through. Perhaps he had once been one of them. Or perhaps he never passed through at all, only stayed, only suffered, only died.
Too far to walk, but not too far to think about. The Romans left their mark on Peterborough in mosaics, in pottery, in the walls of Castor church. In the villas at Itter Crescent, in the name of Water Newton, in the layers of the land. And now, in this. A single man nailed to wood, his body left in the earth, waiting for someone to find him. The past only stays hidden until it is uncovered.
But the Fenland earth does not erase, it preserves. The damp, peaty ground, heavy with time, held him when history did not. Others executed like him were left exposed, their bodies picked apart by crows, by time, by forgetting. But here, the soil wrapped around him, let him remain. The heel bone, the nail, the trace of wood still there, evidence left intact when it should have been lost. His grave was shallow. He was not meant to be remembered. But the earth does not always obey.
The Flying Scotsman came past last weekend on the Nene Valley Railway. A steam engine, rebuilt and restored, still drawing crowds. But if every part has been replaced at some point, can it still be the same thing? At what point does something stop being itself? The city is full of things that look like what they were but aren’t. A street that has the same name but not the same buildings. A station that isn’t in quite the same place. A school where the walls have changed but the kids walk the same routes. The Flying Scotsman keeps running, and so does Peterborough, but whether either is the real thing anymore depends on who you ask.
Today, two seals are basking in the sun on the Nene near Alwalton, hauled up on the banks like misplaced statues. Sea dwellers turned freshwater anglers, watching the world from a river that should not be theirs. Another kind of arrival, another kind of resettlement. They were not meant to be here, but they are, and they have made do.
Peterborough continues its cycle of demolition and replacement. The Regional Pool, opened in 1976, was once a proud municipal offering, a place where children learned to swim, where whole generations spent damp Saturday mornings under strip lights and chlorine haze. But like so many 1970s structures, its concrete had failed. Riddled with asbestos, crumbling at the core, it was deemed unsafe. In 2025, the demolition began.
The Market and Northminster car parks followed. Built using the experimental ‘lift slab’ method, their demolition became inevitable when the structures were declared unsound. They were ugly things, but they worked. Now they are gone, and the city is left with another hole to fill. The promise is always for something better, but in Peterborough, replacement rarely means improvement.
Something else was lost too: the cinemas that once anchored the city’s social life. The Art Deco Odeon, with its sweeping façade, and the more brutalist ABC, three screens, enough, more than enough. A city only needs three screens, not twelve, not an out-of-town Showcase rising from a car park like an aircraft hangar. The Showcase took them all away, and with them, the simple act of queuing outside. Waiting for the doors to open, the posters promising adventures just beyond reach, the hush that fell when the lights dimmed. Now, the cinema is just another retail experience, another thing to be consumed, stripped of the ritual, the anticipation.
For years, people said Peterborough would change when it had a university. A proper city at last. A new identity. Culture, students, life. But this isn’t quite that.
ARU Peterborough arrived in 2022, a £30 million partnership with Anglia Ruskin, who? No dreaming spires, no ivy-clad quads, just a sleek modern campus built for boosting skills and business rather than cultivating lost poets. No history, no weight of tradition. The university of practical ambition.
And where is it? Built on the site of the Wirrina, where people once danced. Roller-skated too. A place of movement, now replaced by seminar rooms and silent study spaces. A different kind of learning, maybe, but the past paved over as always.
No punting on the Nene, well, not yet. Maybe in a few decades, they’ll be poling past the warehouses, pretending it was always this way.
The psychogeographic drift moves westward, away from the city, past the new university, past the last hopeful attempts at reinvention, into something older. Here, the landscape holds different ghosts. Monk’s Cave hides in the trees near Thorpe Hall, an 18th-century folly carved into the rock, its origins more ornamental than sacred. No monks ever meditated here. No whispered prayers echoed in the stone. Just a garden feature, built to impress visitors who once strolled through landscaped grounds, pausing to admire its rough-hewn entrance, its air of mystery. Whatever stillness it once had is long gone. Now, the dual carriageway deposits people westward, out of Peterborough, towards the A1, towards escape. No one stops for a cave anymore.
On the opposite side of the road, another monument stands, but of a different order. A wooden statue, arms raised, looking out across the junction. A distant cousin of him up north, the Angel, but less grand, less commanding. More like a forgotten sentinel, watching the world rush by. No one pauses for him either.
Peterborough, by contrast, has always been shaped by what it is not. Not quite a London commuter town, not quite a Fenland outpost, not quite industrial, not quite suburban. A city in between, always being reshaped, always losing more than it gains. The lost streets beneath Queensgate, the old hospital site now reduced to memory, the wind moving ceaselessly over land too flat to resist.
To walk Peterborough is to walk a city that does not fully know itself, a city where absence is often more powerful than presence. A place caught in the gaps, between history and erasure, between aspiration and neglect, between arrival and departure. Unfinished, unresolved, always in motion.
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