Cambridge pub where Pink Floyd was born is saved from demolition but dwarfed by a £500m office block next door

From the Newshound archive · first published 5 October 2026.

The tiny Flying Pig pub in Cambridge, where Syd Barrett met David Gilmour and Pink Floyd was born, has survived the bulldozers only to be engulfed by a towering 105ft office development built right behind it. The £500m scheme, marketed as 1 Botanic Place, looms over the early-Victorian boozer and has swallowed most of its grounds. Former landlady Justine Hatfield, who ran the pub for 24 years, says she now walks a long way round just to avoid seeing it.

Hatfield says only around 20 per cent of the pub she loved still remains, with the back garden torn up by developers.

'I hate the buildings around it, because they represent the destruction of something we loved,' she said.

A pub has stood on the Cambridge site since at least 1844, when it was recorded as The Engineer.