Walk down Bridge Street in St Ives on a Tuesday morning and you’ll pass more people clutching takeaway coffee in their slippers than you’d expect for a market town at nine o’clock. Plenty of them, if you ask, used to rent in Cambridge, usually in the sort of one-bed off Mill Road where the desk ends up wedged beside the wardrobe. For a lot of them, the move twelve miles up the Great Ouse started with a conversation with letting agents in St Ives for remote workers once the shine of city living had worn off.
The reasoning isn’t complicated, though it took a pandemic and a few years of hybrid contracts to make it obvious. People paid Cambridge rents to be near the office. Take the office out of the picture for three or four days a week and you’re left paying a premium for a commute you don’t make very often.
The Trouble With the One-Bed
Rents in Cambridge have been among the highest outside London for a long time now, and anyone who has queued at a viewing near the station knows how fast decent flats disappear. What you’re buying with that money is location. The colleges, the Science Park, the hospital campus and a good night out are all close by, and for someone in an office five days a week that’s worth paying for.
For a home worker it’s worth rather less. Plenty of the flats built around CB1 and out at Eddington were designed with commuters in mind, so the second bedroom, if there is one, can be barely wide enough for a bed, let alone a desk and a chair you’d want to sit in all day. You end up taking calls from the sofa with the washing machine going behind you, and most people put up with that for longer than they’d care to admit.
So the question shifts. Rather than asking how close to work you can afford to live, you start asking how much space your work actually needs, and that’s a question Cambridge struggles to answer at a price most renters can manage.
A Market Town That Works From Home
St Ives sits on the Great Ouse in Huntingdonshire, and its centre is small enough that you’ll stop needing a map within a week. There’s the Monday market on Market Hill, Oliver Cromwell’s statue glaring down at the shoppers, and the old bridge with a little chapel built into the middle of it, one of only a handful left in England. None of that pays the bills, obviously. But if you’re spending eight hours a day indoors, the place you step out into at lunchtime starts to matter a great deal.
The houses are the real argument, though. Close to the centre you’ll find Victorian terraces with long, narrow gardens, while the estates towards the edge of town and the villages just beyond, Hemingford Grey, Houghton, Fenstanton and Needingworth among them, have plenty of three-bedroom family homes that would cost a lot more in Cambridge, if you could find them at all. The box room becomes an office. And the dining table goes back to being a dining table, which does more for the working day than most people expect.
Is the walking any good? Better than you’d guess, since the riverside path heads west towards Houghton Mill, which the National Trust looks after, and the meadows across the water bring you down to Hemingford Grey without much effort at all.
Getting Back Into Cambridge
Very few jobs are fully remote, and the ones that call you in once a week still need a way of getting there. St Ives is on the northern stretch of the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, the concrete track laid along the old St Ives to Cambridge railway and opened in 2011. Buses run through Swavesey and Long Stanton before reaching the Science Park and the city centre, and some carry on towards Addenbrooke’s.
The city end can crawl at rush hour, and nobody who uses it regularly would pretend otherwise. Still, for two days a week it’s a fair trade. If you drive, the rebuilt A14 has made the run to Cambridge far less of a lottery than it used to be, and Huntingdon station, fifteen minutes or so away by car, puts London within reach for anyone whose head office is down there rather than out in the Fens.
It’s also worth being honest with yourself about how often you’ll really go in. Two days a week on the busway is a very different proposition to four, and for a lot of tenants the answer to that one question decides whether St Ives suits them or whether somewhere closer, like Histon or Cottenham, makes more sense.
What a Local Agent Actually Helps With
Moving to a town you’ve only visited on a Sunday afternoon is a bit of a leap. A good local agent knows the things a listing won’t tell you: which roads near the river you’d want to ask about after a wet winter, which villages get snapped up the moment a family home appears, and which properties have a layout that genuinely suits someone working from home.
Ask the boring questions early. What’s the broadband like, and is it fibre to the property or only to the cabinet down the road? Will a proper desk fit in the third bedroom? If you’re self-employed or contracting, referencing can work a little differently too, so it helps to find out what proof of income they’ll want before you fall for a house.
Timing trips people up more than anything else. Cambridge tenancies are commonly fixed for twelve months, and getting a start date in St Ives that doesn’t leave you paying two rents for six weeks takes a bit of planning, plus an agent willing to fit viewings around your calendar rather than theirs.
Not Everything Is Better
St Ives is quieter than Cambridge, and if that sounds like a selling point now, it may feel different on a Friday night in February when your friends are all in town and the last bus has gone. Restaurant choice is narrower. The outlying villages have patchy bus services, so a car stops being optional fairly quickly once you live beyond walking distance of the centre.
The rental market isn’t exactly slack either. Good houses with gardens go fast, especially in spring and early summer, and anyone arriving with the idea that a market town means less competition tends to learn otherwise within a fortnight. Having references ready and knowing what you can’t do without will save you a lot of disappointment.
Final Thoughts
For most of the last few decades St Ives was thought of as somewhere you commuted from, a pleasant place to sleep between days in Cambridge, but the people moving there now often barely commute at all. They’re choosing it for the river and the market and the extra room, which is a different kind of relationship with a town and probably a healthier one.
Nobody knows quite where hybrid working will settle, and a few large employers pulling staff back into offices could shift things again. That uncertainty is partly why renting makes sense here. A year or two in a house by the Great Ouse is a low-risk way to find out what kind of life you want once the commute stops dictating it, and I suspect a fair few of those tenants won’t be going back.
