The Name
There are various theories on how a humble corporation lamppost has come to be known as Reality Checkpoint, although like all urban myths, fact has become confused with, well, half-fact.
Sandy Cairncross confirms that "Reality Checkpoint" had already been written on the lamppost in indelible marker pen "a year or two" earlier than their repainting in 1973, and that a number of people who saw them painting it asked if they could preserve the inscription. So they did.
David Cairncross recalls that it had been his plan from the outset to retain and if possible improve and enhance this, and that the visit to King’s library was also to find suitable examples of lettering:
I had in mind the kind used for some old-fashioned fairground rides, preferably in red and gold. I didn’t succeed in finding a suitable set of examples, and also thought the execution might prove both a distraction and too much of a challenge, so postponed that element of the plan and concentrated on colour schemes for fish. The repainting of the inscription that we did was in the nature of a placeholder job, and I always meant to return to do it properly.
The only change the Cairncrosses made was not to follow the request of one observer to keep it on the same side of the plinth. "He used it to navigate on his way home when drunk," says Sandy. No doubt he was avoiding any unwelcome attention from the overlooking police station. The change of position must have disoriented the poor man.
Sandy’s recollections therefore confirm those of many other people: that the name predates the 1973 decoration.
There is an interesting comment in Warren Dosanjh's The Music Scene of 1960s Cambridge (6th ed. 2015):
Behind the Masonic Hall, in St Andrew’s Hill past Frank’s Cafe was the popular Bun Shop pub. Shortly before it was ripped away in the redevelopment, it was the last call before a trip across nearby Parker’s Piece to the Dandelion Cafe on East Road. That was when, in the pitchblack of the 1972 power cuts, the unlit lamp post on the Piece became known as "Reality Checkpoint".
Mick Brown on Twitter adds:
I first heard the name used by stoned hippies going to the Dandelion Cafe from the Bun Shop during the blackouts of 1972 - but it may have been used earlier.
"Sleeping on a dandelion"
Syd Barrett, "Flaming" (1967)
There is indeed anecdotal evidence that the name dates back even further than this. When the subject came up on the cam.misc Google group in 1998, one contributor commented:
[Around] 1969-ish. When "Arjuna" was in genesis, regular meetings were held over the shop. During these meetings, participants would become intoxicated, and walk home in an elevated mental state. One of these people scrawled "Reality Checkpoint" in black paint marker over the lamp post's pale green verdigris faux. Probably on the Police Station side.
The three founders of Arjuna wholefoods moved into 12 Mill Road in the winter of 1969/70 and the shop opened later in 1970. Whoever is referred to here, perhaps this was the man Sandy Cairncross mentioned?
Top left: Dandelion on East Road, a coffee bar serving vegetarian food. Syd Barrett played two of his last gigs here as part of the trio Stars, in February 1972, the month of the national miners' strike and power shortages. Next door is Cambridge Resale, which I recall as a treasure trove of second-hand records and hi-fi equipment.
Bottom left: The Bun Shop on St Andrews Hill, Downing Street. It had a colourful wall mural in the bar which I remember was briefly exposed to passers-by when the building was finally demolished in 1975 as part of the Lion Yard development. Reality Checkpoint was equidistant between these two hippie hotspots.
David Cairncross has his own theories about the origin of the name:
There was enough in the zeitgeist in late sixties / early seventies Cambridge, coupled with the ambience of the middle of Parker’s Piece on dark and foggy evenings, for it just to have bubbled out of the collective subconscious as the right time coincided with the right place in the right part of the world.
He acknowledges the influence of Checkpoint Charlie, the name given by the Western Allies to the best-known Berlin Wall crossing point between East Berlin and West Berlin during the Cold War, and the popularity of Carlos Castaneda’s 1971 memoir A Separate Reality.
Whatever its origins, without the efforts of the Cairncrosses that autumn afternoon in 1973 it is quite likely the name would have faded with the seventies. As it was, it stuck and Reality Checkpoint was well enough established as a hallowed spot to warrant a mention in the 1976/7 Varsity Handbook.
The following year, the 1977/8 Varsity Handbook commented:
The Pieces [Christ's and Parker's] are the great divide: it's not surprising that on the lamp-post in the middle of Parker's Piece someone has etched the words "Reality Checkpoint": you have to leave Narnia and go back into the real world.
The Town
Something is happening here but you don't know what it is.
If you walk diagonally across Parker’s Piece, from the University Arms Hotel towards the Mill Road/East Road roundabout, you’ll pass a single lamp-post at the halfway point, on which the words "Reality Checkpoint" have been etched. Behind you are the colleges, the faculty buildings, and the big shops of the "historic centre". Ahead are the terraced streets off Mill Road and East Road, the small shops where you can buy about everything including a cut-price kitchen sink, and beyond are the housing estates of Romsey Town. There’s a pub off Mill Road called the Midland Tavern: the beer is Tolly and it’s keg. Try walking in there on a Saturday evening wearing a CAMRA T-shirt and moaning about pressurised beer. You can do it in the centre: you’re a Cam U undergraduate, and you can be as eccentric, or arrogant, or just bloody rude, as you like, and it’ll be passed off as normal student behaviour. It is normal student behaviour, after all. But you’ll find that most people living in Cambridge don’t give a damn about students, or if they do, they don’t like them much. They might not actually tell you that in the Midland Tavern, but you’ll get the message quickly enough. Hence reality checkpoint. So you know which side you’re on.
Varsity Handbook, 1976/7
