“Economic growth is like a bonfire,” says Matthew Bullock. “You can get a bonfire going and expand it as long as you keep feeding the centre. But you can’t pick a bonfire up and move it somewhere else.”

Bullock is talking about the economy of Greater Cambridge, where a staggering level of growth has outpaced the rest of the UK over the past decade. As one of the founders of the business and academic organisation Cambridge Ahead, Bullock has been helping to shape a vision for Cambridge and the people who live and work in the area.

“Growth here comes up through the floorboards,” says Bullock, who was one of the original financiers of the ‘Cambridge Phenomenon’ – the development and growth in high-tech businesses in and around the city since the late 1970s – and is now Master of St Edmund’s College.

“The city has the highest number of patent applications per hundred thousand people compared with any other city in the UK. Innovation, networks, start-ups, collaboration, entrepreneurs – all of these create an energy here that’s resulted in discoveries that transform lives around the world, and a wave of expansion in jobs and business clusters locally.” Matthew Bullock

Today, around 60,000 people work in 4,700 knowledge-intensive companies in Greater Cambridge, particularly in computers and software, life sciences, high-tech manufacturing and AI. These companies contribute around a third of global turnover of all companies based in the area. Global companies such as Amazon, Apple, ARM and AstraZeneca have chosen Cambridge to relocate or expand their offices.

But success often comes at a price. The agglomerative benefits that have brought new and innovative businesses towards the economic heat of this ‘bonfire’ have also brought soaring house prices, social inequality and congested roads.

Cambridge city’s average house price in 1997 was 4.5 times a median salary; today it is 16 times. And in 2018, the think tank Centre for Cities reported that Cambridge was the least equal city in the UK.

“House prices and rents are becoming unaffordable, pricing people away from the city and into car-dependency,” says Bullock. If employment continues to grow at the rate of the past five years, in-commuters would rise by 82%, which would mean 160,000 commuters coming into Cambridge by 2031. “Our roads couldn’t handle this.”

Bullock is also part of the leadership team behind the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Independent Economic Review (CPIER), which for the past year has been examining the region’s economy, infrastructure, society – and its future. The team recently reported its findings to the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority – the body responsible for local strategic transport and infrastructure planning.

“If nothing is done, ” says the CPIER report, “the damage to society from the continuing drift away of less well-paid workers may become irreparable, the ageing of the city will affect its dynamism, and the cost to people’s mental health of commuting-induced stress and housing insecurity will soar.”