THE NEW RAD

June 2024. Cambridge.

A Sunday night back in Waterbeach, where Mum & Dad have found a new gardener, one less task for me.

We squeezed in a quick trip to Cambridge, where the 800 year old Midsummer Fair (looking a little slimmed down compared to its 1298 peak, I thought) was wrapping up.

Newmarket Road has lost many of its boozers over the last 20 years,

I can’t believe the Zebra (Bass here in 2001) is still derelict.

Oddly, the local Cambridge clickbait rag was asking the very same question the next week;

Happier news at the St Radegund, your first stop on the King St crawl where town meets gown.

Four years of post-Covid renovation have transformed Cambridge’s once scruffiest pub into a bare boards craft bar.

I admired the soundtrack,

Mrs RM, not an obvious fan of scruffy pubs, recalled raucous nights on Polish vodka under graffitied walls.

“What have they done !”.

That may be a bit unfair, the newly christened “Rad” is possibly exactly what Cambridge needs beer wise, but the seating is possibly going to wind up Stafford Paul.

Young Cambridge CAMRA love the place, the staff great, the cask Green Devil was good, and the keg decently priced,

but, fearing I’d find the toilets now fit for human habitation, I gave the walk down to the Gents a miss.

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Published by retiredmartin

Retired NHS, doing long walks around UK and the world to record the great bits. Focused on Good Beer Guide pubs and live music.

26 thoughts on “THE NEW RAD”

  1. “but the seating is possibly going to wind up Stafford Paul”.

    No, I’ll make sure that venue’s not on my itinerary this autumn.

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    2. It’s almost as if the pub owners have gone out of their way to make things as uncomfortable as possible for their customers.

      Don’t they want people to stay?

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      3. Message heard on the seating. (We’ve heard it elsewhere too.)

        Bear in mind as well as the chairs pictured, which I’m not a huge fan of myself) there are also stools (which suit me better, but maybe not folks in this conversation I suspect) and more than half the bum-space in the pub is bench seating which I find quite comfortable (I designed and built it, it’s not just 90 degree boxes, I ran through a few iterations of the angling until I settled on what was finally built). Though admittedly the bench seating is all “hard”/timber surface, and I know some folks prefer a bit of padding.

        The seating at the moment had to fit a budget basically, in time we hopefully have the budget to make some changes and I think some new seating will be one of the sooner-rather-than-later changes. We could try adding padding to the stools and chairs perhaps, but I’m thinking a more complete change of design on those is more helpful. (Previously the pub just had hard wooden bench seats and old squat “velvet” topped pub stools – maybe they’re actually better?)

        There’s plenty of room for improvement, and plenty of work still to do. (But it’ll never be possible to make a pub that suits everyone of course, we’ll just do the best we can in our way!)

        Cheers -Yvan (one third of the Rad team)

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      4. Cheers Yvan, and always run a pub your way ! I’d never tell you how to run a pub and younger CAMRA members seem to like the seating. But I guess it’s OK to feel a sense of loss for something (even something that wouldn’t meet current standards). In fairness the old Rad probably lost thing we feel nostalgic that 20 year ago .It’s a bit like football fans feeling a sense of loss when their team leaves a crumbling Upton Park or Maine Road for a new stadium, perhaps ?

        I’ll definitely pop back as the beer and the music was so good.

        Cheers

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      1. I think it was later. I don’t suppose you remember a Tolly pub called the Five (or was it Six) Bells just over the East Road roundabout? We did a number of Friday night runs and never saw anyone else in it.

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      6. I remember a Saturday evening there when some of us had won a few bets ( what was the bookie in King Street called?) . The Irish landlord had scored as well. At my time of life you tend to wallow in nights like that.

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  4. Five Bells now replaced by “The Bird or Worm”. No cask when it first opened, will not be going back.

    Cow and Calf had fabulous Beamish. Closed down soon after Les left.

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      2. The best night we had in Bamberg, last week, was in a dive bar empty except for the Iranian barman and a Swiss customer, drinking bottled Keesmann Helles.

        Life is weird sometimes.

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      3. Hi! Long time follower of Martin’s blog and pub antics, knew “The Rad” would show up here eventually 😉

        So the story behind how deep the “refurb” had to go is basically: the building was only a few bits of dodgy wood away from being nothing but a pile of rubble in a hole. As a result invasive structural work was required to put in a full-span RSJ across the width of the pub, two new steel lintels in the bar/entry doorways, and several new floor joists. As a result everything had to come out, and once some plaster was coming off, it basically all fell off of its own accord. Pull a nail out of a wall? Square foot of plaster comes out. Etc, etc. The Rad as it was in 2020 was a relic of many decades of neglect – despite more recent building works which were more a band-aid over the rot than anything that improved the structure of the building. As a result of the scale of work building control had to be involved (amusingly they had no prior record of previous works, none, ever), and as a result of that we had to do work involving insulation, fire protection, and more – little could survive this process beyond the basic shape of the building.

        Our original plan was: remodel the bar area, give it all a lick of paint, put in a new modern dispense system and open! Oh boy…

        This turned into a 3-year-long-haul renovation project that cost us all far too much (with no idea if we’ll ever recover the costs at the moment.) I doubt many other people would have been mad/stupid enough not to have just run away when we hit the structural issues. Such is the cost of our inexperience in such buildings and projects. Probably it’d be some nice little office or higher-margin retail store by now, it’d have made for a better café than pub perhaps.

        But we’re pub/bar people and a pub is what we wanted to be! There was no hope of recreating the lost past – short of a time machine or necromancy, so we’ve made it our own modern thing, but it’s currently a sort of a blank canvas that needs building on. Some of the history, in terms of the trove of artefacts we have, are slowly returning – as and when time permits (I have a full time job which I owe a lot of lost hours to due to the Rad) – and we’ll bring in new stuff too. And so the wheel turns, and in time it’ll be someone else’s pub, and it’ll change again – as all things do.

        Cheers – Yvan (one of the team of 3 people who committed this atrocity!)

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