The full name of the church is St Edward King &Martyr Church of England Church, and it is located in a tiny Square here in Cambridge that is almost taken up by the church.
A tiny cafe is on one side and a second hand bookshop on another alley that doglegs around the church. The alley (hardly a street) on which I was standing is St Edward’s Passage, and at the end it turns off the left on Peas Hill. Why it is called ‘Hill’ is a mystery to me because it is as level and flat as a pancake.
Wikipedia has a stab at an answer, but not very convincing either for hill or for ‘Peas’
The area is not strictly speaking a hill, being lower in elevation than some surrounding areas, but was once a slope down to the river upon which the city’s main fish market stood. It is likely that its name is a corruption of the Latin pisces (fish) as there is no evidence that peas were ever exclusively grown or sold on the site.
The opening line of the History page of the website of St Edward’s Church reads “There was almost certainly a Saxon church on this site, though the present church dates back to the 13th century.”
So the building is somewhere around nine hundred years old. I look at the church sometimes when I cut through from Kings Parade. And a couple of times recently I saw that they are doing a lot of work to the grounds. But I didn’t stop.
This time the name board stopped me, and then the notice on the ground behind it, and then the stumps of trees.
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