Date published: 2007/03/02
Like Cambridge, Utrecht is flat and has dreary weather (well, the same is true of much of East Anglia from Cambridge up to the Wash, and of most of Holland).
Utrecht has over twice the population of Cambridge and so is larger in extent. Utrecht has much nicer buildings in the city centre, especially 19th century ones. Many of these buildings have been converted from commercial to residential use, whereas in Cambridge if anything these days the opposite happens.
Like the rest of Holland, Utrecht has a fantastic cycle network. They even seem to get priority over pedestrians. Indeed, in some places there is no alternative but for pedestrians to either cross the street or walk in a cycle lane and face getting run over by a cyclist. (The cyclists in Utrecht are just as lunatic as those in Cambridge.)
Utrecht University moved out to a new campus just beyond the edge of town in the 1970s. Around the same time Cambridge started to move some departments to the edge of town. But Utrecht University is on one site, whereas Cambridge has opted for two, West Cambridge and the Addenbrookes site, and most departments are still in the city proper. Utrecht and Cambridge both have a physics department in a dreary 1970s building clad in grey pebbledashing.
The railway station in Utrecht is in a sensible location, right next to the heart of the city. It has a thriving commercial area, a fairly typical mall, embedded right in the station. This is in stark contrast to the Cambridge railway station, which is not that near anything of interest, except housing for London commuters.
Holland seems to have a functioning train and road network. England seems to have neither. Of course no matter what country you are in, people will complain about the transport network, especially the train network, no matter how good it is. (What is it about train users that they think society should subsidise their lifestyle even more than it already does?)
Schipol airport is a marvel. You walk easily and seemlessly from the arrival terminal to the train station. Train fares from the airport are reasonable. The airport is well built and is clean. (The one really bad point about it is the almost complete lack of seating in the departure terminals.) The comparison with Heathrow could not be more black and white. (It will be a minor miracle if Terminal 5 works anywhere near as well as Schipol.)
Stansted is not too much worse than Schipol in terms of architecture, although of course it is much smaller so the comparison is not that fair. But Stansted is much worse than Schipol in practise ever since the bogus terrorism alerts started a year or two ago. At Stansted the security control freaks are really nasty about carry-on luggage. (One woman had two small A4-sized bags and they insisted she had to put one in the other to be allowed through.) And the queues on arrival at Stansted passport control are almost always overflowing. (The non-EU citizens normally have a better time of it these days because there are so many less of them.)
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