Trumpington

Trumpington is a village in Cambridgeshire, England, mostly located in Cambridge, with a small southern area of the village extending into the South Cambridgeshire district. As of the 2021 UK census, the village had a population of 12,393 people.

The village was a separate parish from the Anglo-Saxon era until the 20th century. In 1912 all of the land north of Long Road was transferred to Cambridge, and on 1 April 1934 most of the remaining land, including all of the village, was also given over to Cambridge. Only 382 acres (155 ha), almost uninhabited, were transferred to Haslingfield parish. In 1931 the parish had a population of 1183.

The Cambridge Local Plan 2006 took land around the village out of the green belt and paved the way for an urban extension due for completion in 2023. A map of the enlarge village is available in The Trumpet, a community magazine produced by the parish church.

There is evidence of Iron Age and Roman settlements in Trumpington, near the River Cam ford by the road to Grantchester, and a Roman cemetery. An Anglo-Saxon cemetery has also been found nearby at Dam Hill.

In 2012 archaeologists working on the Trumpington Meadows site discovered a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon bed burial for a young woman aged about 16 years old, in a field on the outskirts of the village. The occupant of the grave had been buried on a wooden bed, and had an ornate gold pectoral cross inlaid with garnets on her breast. The jewelled gold cross is very unusual, and can only have belonged to a member of a rich aristocratic family. It is thought that the grave must have been associated with a hitherto unknown Anglo-Saxon settlement near the site, perhaps that of a monastic community.

The Domesday Book of 1086 records a community of 33 peasants. The population had risen to 100 by the late 13th century. The village remained sizeable throughout the Middle Ages and by 1801 there were 494 residents. By the time the parish was dissolved there were about 1,200 inhabitants. Until the 20th century Trumpington was an agricultural village with cattle and sheep as well as crops.

Trumpington's association with agriculture was extended in 1955, when the Plant Breeding Institute (PBI) – founded in 1912 as part of the University of Cambridge's School of Agriculture – moved to the Anstey Hall site adjoining Maris Lane in Trumpington. Here the PBI developed new plants, notably potatoes called Maris Piper and Maris Peer, a barley called Maris Otter, and a wheat called Maris Widgeon. These are now in use worldwide. The PBI was split up and privatised in 1987. In 1990 the PBI moved to Colney, near Norwich, but the reference to the Maris Lane site survives in the names of plants.

Anstey Hall is a Grade I listed, former country house built c. 1700 within its own parkland. Once owned by writer and poet Christopher Anstey and later by the polymath Robert Leslie Ellis, it was leased to the PBI for many years. It is now used for weddings, parties, corporate events and meetings.