Summary (by AI): I found my visit to The Eagle in Cambridge to be an incredibly cool experience, as I was deeply impressed by its rich history involving WWII airmen and the discovery of DNA.
Blog: The Eagle: A Cambridge Legend
Cambridge—and really, Cambridgeshire as a whole—has an incredibly impressive collection of what I’d call traditional pubs. They are absolutely beautiful examples of the craft. A friend and I were recently in town for our "ABC tour," and while we hit quite a few notable spots, my prior research kept pointing toward one quintessentially Cambridgeshire pub: The Eagle.
We turned up there after having had a few beers elsewhere. It’s located right in the heart of the historical center, surrounded by old churches and the winding streets of the Old Town. Unsurprisingly, it was absolutely rammed with tourists. We were technically in that camp ourselves, of course, but I did wonder how many of the people packed in there actually knew the full history of the place.
The Eagle is famous for two major reasons.
The RAF Bar
The first is what’s known as the RAF Bar, located at the back of the pub. During the Second World War, Cambridge was noted for having the most densely populated area of RAF camps in the country. To this day, you still see a few of them around, like RAF Wyton and others. Back then, The Eagle became the primary haunt for the RAF lads.
One day, one of the airmen decided to stand up on a table and use the burnt end of a cork to write his name, initials, and squadron number on the ceiling. That sparked a trend, and soon everyone was doing the same. Today, the ceiling and walls are completely covered in this wartime graffiti.
For a while, the ceiling was left to go to rack and ruin; it was actually on the verge of being painted over or taken down. Thankfully, someone realized they were looking at a historical manuscript—a physical footprint of those who served—and moved to save it. When you look up now, you can see all those cork signatures. It doesn’t look particularly "original" in a pristine sense, but the fact that it’s there and preserved is incredibly cool.
The Secret of Life
The second thing the pub is famous for—and perhaps what it’s best known for globally—involves two scientists working in a college just around the corner in the early 1950s.
These two guys, Francis Crick and James Watson, used to head to The Eagle every day for lunch (and likely a few pints). On one particular day in 1953, they walked in and famously announced that they had "discovered the secret of life." What they had actually done was work out the double-helix structure of DNA.
Because of that moment, the pub has a reputation as the birthplace of modern genetics. However, in the last twenty or thirty years, there’s been a much-needed realization that Crick and Watson shouldn’t have received all the credit. There was a whole team involved, specifically a woman—Rosalind Franklin—whose work with X-ray radiography was absolutely fundamental to their discovery.
There’s a blue plaque on the side of the pub wall that commemorates the event. It was updated fairly recently to include the names of those who were previously overlooked. It’s a nice nod to making sure history is remembered properly, recognizing the whole group of people rather than just the two guys who walked into the pub that day.
The Map: