Cambridge Market for Beginners

Cambridge market has a bewildering array of stalls, selling everything from cheap fruit and veg to truffles to second hand records to pottery to "I *heart* LONDON" t-shirts.

What follows clearly isn't a complete inventory of the stalls, or even of the good ones: it's just a biased selection of some of the ones that I use a lot. There's loads more good things to be found (I mean, I haven't even mentioned the fudge or the cheese or the Hot Sausages...) so go and explore.

The coffee man

The phrase "a true Cambridge institution" is massively overused, not least by me, but the coffee man is it. The basic idea is fairly self-explanatory - a wide range of teas and coffees, the latter ground (or not) to your specification. The quality is generally top notch, although the bags aren't completely airtight so you'll trail a distinct smell of roasted beans around with you for the rest of the day. The coffee man himself is remarkably calm and quiet for someone who spends his life surrounded by enough caffeine to get a small army wired, and gives the general impression that he'll be there long after the university has crumbled.

The olive and spice stall

Again, fairly self explanatory - a really impressive range of spices, some really nice olives sold by the pot, reasonably priced olive oil and a few odds and ends of nuts, dried fruit, rice cakes and similar stuff.

The self-service vegetable stall near the middle

For my money, this is about the best of the regular / cheap vegetable stalls. They get in a good range of slightly obscure stuff sometimes (look out for wild mushrooms in autumn, horseradish root, jerusalem artichokes), and while I haven't compared their prices against the other vegetable stalls on the market, they seem to be significantly cheaper than Sainsburys. The quality is generally decent, and stuff is below par then you can tell by looking at it because (unlike some of the vegetable stalls) it's self-service. They also tend to sell stuff that's local and in season where they can, but not to the exclusion of everything else.

The Caribbean cake man

Nice cakes plus tasty (and cheap) Jamaica patties. Generally so friendly that if you stop within a couple of metres of them for more than a few seconds you'll end up buying something. Not that that's a bad thing.

The book stall

They sell books. We like books. They've generally got a good stock of interesting stuff, so it's always worth a look.