As university towns, Cambridge and Oxford are oddly disconnected from the UK’s capital when compared with those in other European countries. France’s leading universities are mostly in Paris, by contrast.
As David Willetts, former minister for universities and science, and a British Conservative Party politician, writes in his 2017 book, A university education: “England is unusual, perhaps unique, in that its two most prestigious universities, Oxford and Cambridge, are not in the capital city.”
On the opposite end of the political spectrum, the Marxist intellectual historian Perry Anderson has, since the 1960s, argued that one of the peculiarities of the UK, specifically England, is that its two premier universities are, in sharp contrast to France in particular, located outside the capital, and therefore at a debilitating structural remove from the nation’s strategic political and economic centres. In a long series of essays published in the New Left Review, he stakes out an analysis of the oddities of the UK that seeks to explain the persistent economic under-performance of the world’s first industrialised country.
In an essay on France in the London Review of Books, he draws out a contrast between Paris and other European capitals, including London: “The exceptional position of Paris as political and intellectual centre of the nation [is] a position occupied by no other city in a European society of comparable size. Madrid, Rome, Berlin may be capitals, but to their rank as seats of government corresponds no such predominance in culture, where Barcelona, Milan, Frankfurt can in different ways rival or outdo them. London is flanked by seats of learning whose prestige has long surpassed its own.”
A remarkable consensus from two of the big brains of Britain’s intellectual spectrum, Tory and Marxist, both pointing out the strangeness of the country’s university landscape, at least in European terms.
This matters because the UK’s so-called “golden triangle” of London, Oxford and Cambridge is, arguably, less economically beneficial to the nation than it could be. Think of the synergies lost. One way an Oxford academic put this to me recently was that the “triangle lacks a hypotenuse”. Less mathematically, this meant, as an Oxford resident, when I visited the offices of Capgemini’s Cambridge Consultants on the Cambridge Science Park on a boiling hot day in June, I was unable to take an air-conditioned train from Oxford to Cambridge.
The government is planning a new railway line that will connect the two cities to help develop the “Oxford-Cambridge Arc” as the Silicon Valley of Europe. Historically, Cambridge has been the marginally more scientific and technical of these two university towns, whereas Oxford has tended to provide the UK with its prime ministers. The past half dozen were all educated there, and 31 of the total of 58.
Meanwhile, Cambridge, running to historical form, was the place where one of the earliest attempts to connect scientific research with business practice was founded, in 1960 – Cambridge Consultants.
Going deep into technology
Tim Eiloart, Rodney Dale and David Southward were the three young Cambridge University graduates who founded a firm that, from its beginning, set out to marry scientific research with strategic consultancy. It was part of Arthur D Little, a US management consulting firm, from 1971 to 2002, when it was acquired by Altran. And it was a pioneer of the famous Cambridge Cluster of technology companies.
Today, it dubs itself a “deep tech powerhouse”, and its projects include bioengineering, artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, and stratospheric connectivity.
Customers include all British energy suppliers, with technology that provides smart meter connectivity for hard-to-reach residences, and pet care company Purina, with a smart litterbox system for monitoring cat behaviour to improve their health.
It has 740 staff, mostly at its Cambridge headquarters, 90% of whom are engineers, technologists, consultants, designers and scientists. It has more than 100 laboratories, has created over 5,000 patents a year for its clients, and has spun out more than 20 companies. And it works in more than 35 countries, with offices in Boston, Singapore and Tokyo, as well as Cambridge.
Monty Barlow, chief executive officer of the firm, which has been part of Capgemini since 2020, joined Cambridge Consultants from Churchill College, Cambridge, where he took a degree in electrical and information sciences, with a concentration in AI and robotics, in 1999.
He has been, variously, head of AI, director of strategic technology, and chief technology officer at the company.
In 1960, the founders had “the simple idea then of putting academic thinking at the disposal of industry, which today sounds obvious”, says Barlow. “Now, MIT will have big accelerators. Universities are in on the act [so] it doesn’t seem so weird to bridge academia and industry. But at the time, it was. Strategic advice, always centred in some way around technology, is a really important part of what we do. Helping clients set an ambition that’s appropriate and sufficiently big is really important.”
He describes deep tech companies as those based on inventive new applications of science and technology. “They’re the Microsofts and Googles and Amazons. A few clever people have got together at some point and decided to do things differently, and have invented things and patented them and moved onwards. It’s not that they found a diamond mine in their backyard or anything like that.”
A broad definition, but how does his firm decide which specific areas of technology to focus on?
Spotting technology with potential
“There’s a whole mix of things,” he says. “There are the insights coming from particular markets we work in, where people are starting to ask about emergent things. There’s the passion of the individuals who work here. And then there is bringing that all together. Our chief technology officer and an innovation officer ultimately run fairly informal mechanisms that are constantly crowd-sourcing, thinking and comparing client needs.”
Their people could see some technology waves before they were in the mainstream, he says. “We started going big on the proper deep learning AI revolution in the 2010s. I could see it coming a mile off, but the world took a while to notice.
“My ears always prick up when I hear about a technology that does something surprising or seemingly impossible”
Monty Barlow, Cambridge Consultants
“My ears always prick up when I hear about a technology that does something surprising or seemingly impossible. And when we got to the point that I could draw the outline of a painting and an algorithm could fill in the most likely painting that Van Gogh would have done, I thought: ‘I don’t know how I would code that in a million years’. And yet the computers learn to do it overnight.
“Or when somebody says in quantum computing, ‘I can now guarantee information hasn’t been leaked’. It’s not like I trust my locksmith not to make a copy of the front door key he just gave me. He might have done. I somehow know he can’t have done it, drawing a parallel with quantum and information. That, again, is a kind of Eureka moment that’s seemingly impossible. That’s what quantum key distribution offers. So, every time you get one of these little ‘that was impossible 10 years ago for very good reasons, but now somehow it’s doable’ moments, that’s usually a pretty good indicator for us that there’s a thin end of the wedge coming.”
Interdisciplinarity is also critical to what the firm does, he says. “There’s no point in having silos. It’s transfer from one area to another here. If I can beamform radio signals from a satellite, then maybe I can beamform them to the back of the heart [in a cardiac rhythm management device]. You want somebody who’s interested in beamforming, and they’re not a heart specialist or a satellite specialist.”
Finding solutions to big challenges
Cambridge Consultants acts as a front end to big programmes at Capgemini. “When they are doing some deep business transformation and it’s throwing up complex strategic technology challenges, we will jointly work together on that,” says Barlow.
“I think the total of what we offer as Capgemini is quite unusual. A lot of consultancies will have their AI laboratories. But if you look a bit below the skin, there’s talent there, there are some ideas, but a lot of it is often either disconnected from the business or it’s almost a marketing machine as time rolls forward.
“We can, as Capgemini, approach some big client challenges – disruption in their industry, in their supply chain or whatever – and advise on anything from how to first look about finding solutions, through to invention or something new to make it happen. We can make sure the whole thing happens, and we don’t come across competitors who can do that. Of course, running Cambridge Consultants, I might well say that we bring a magic no one else can.”
Barlow says it does this on a global scale. While the firm does its bit for the “Cambridge Cluster” narrative, there is “nothing special about Cambridge University versus any other university”.
“In Cambridge, there has been work on millimetre wave radio communications. It is ever shifting, and it is a really good part of the job, the chance to work with academics from across the UK in cutting-edge research. You need a combination of us and a top UK university to solve some business needs.
“Most of what we do locally is as an employer in the area. We engage in communities. We go to joint things. We like to amplify the Cambridge Cluster message. We do our bit as a local resident, but the majority of the time we are doing work for clients globally,” he says.
The uses and demands on computer systems of all forms are going to go through the roof in years to come, so for those interested in new applications, it should be an exciting time Monty Barlow, Cambridge Consultants
Cambridge Consultants has sites in Boston, Singapore and Tokyo, but the majority of the work is delivered from within the Cambridge facility, with the staff there, he adds.
Britain is doing important stuff
For Computer Weekly’s IT and business leader readership, Barlow says it is important “to understand that Britain is doing some pretty important stuff”.
He adds: “You might not always hear about it. Of course, our logos are never on things that are quietly making things happen from our corner of the UK. A lot of technologies are going to be built on top of the computer revolution coming. They’re going to be digital from day one: the new waves of biology engineering, quantum, and so on. The uses and demands on computer systems of all forms are going to go through the roof in years to come, so for those interested in new applications, it should be an exciting time.
“It’s going to be increasingly important to secure those systems, too. When you are controlling wet labs, the damage is worse than when you lose a few files, so that’s a whole new frontier again. I think we’ll see increasingly specialist jobs in aspects of that appearing.
“The idea of having all your organisation’s knowledge base available through AI. For us to digest everything we have ever written, behind the walls here, that is an exciting thought.”
On Barlow’s account, it seems one point of the golden triangle continues to do its bit for the UK economy. All we need now is a railway line. Or, to put it mathematically, a hypotenuse.
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Jonathan is a tech enthusiast and the mind behind Tech AI Verse. With a passion for artificial intelligence, consumer tech, and emerging innovations, he deliver clear, insightful content to keep readers informed. From cutting-edge gadgets to AI advancements and cryptocurrency trends, Jonathan breaks down complex topics to make technology accessible to all.
