How Gordon Chesterman’s Cambridge bird-feeding ‘rebellion’ took off

Gordon Chesterman’s life on Richmond Road, Cambridge, had been relatively tranquil until he noticed a black post had gone up right outside his house – little did he know, as he was adorning it with two bird feeders, a clock and a thermometer, that he was about to become a national talking point.

“The posts went up a month ago, though there were no signs on them at that point,” explains Gordon, “so I put the attachments on, and later the other posts in the street got their signs put on – saying ‘Permit Holders Only’ – but not mine.”

In the meantime the embellishments to the eight-foot pole proved rather popular.

“The birds favour the fatballs rather than the nutty seed,” explained Gordon, a proctor at the University of Cambridge. “These lovely big crows come and have a feast.

“The outdoor garden clock is going very well: the thermometer fell to -1 last night, that was the first time it went below freezing. I’m hoping to put up Christmas lights soon, and hanging baskets in the spring, maybe a maypole effect with some ribbons on it for May. And a wind vane would be quite nice.”

None of this prevented The Times from eulogising this “council rebellion... in defiance of authority” – even though the decorative act has involved nothing more revolutionary than a few more birds in the street than usual. It didn’t stop the super-charged prose describing Gordon’s actions as akin to ‘Martin Luther nailing paper to a church door or Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama’.

Meanwhile, other online news organisations noted that the neighbours loved the decorations.

“Lots of people have stopped and had a good look, there’s been no complaints,” says Gordon, who would clearly rather play down any drama his act of civic artistry entailed.

“I do have to behave myself,” he remarks, “as I have a fairly responsible position at the university, so I can’t be seen as the Che Guevara of civil unrest.”

Some might say he’s got his work cut out even to be the Citizen Smith of unrest, such is the level of outrage not on display.

But what of the council as this major national movement gets under way in leafy Richmond Road, not so far from St Edmund’s College, where Gordon was made a fellow in 2013, and where precisely no one is quaking in their boots that the apocalypse might be unleashed by one of their very own?

Nothing, though some council workers did say hello when they saw him in the street.

“When they called this morning,” Gordon said on Friday, “that was the first contact. It was a highway patrol type of van, with workers in high-vis jackets.

“It was all very amiable,” Gordon continued of this Geneva Summit-style encounter. “I went and had a chat. There were no requests to take the attachments down. They took about 30 seconds to put the sign up – there’s one sign for each parking bay.”

So how has the publicity has gone down?

“I thought I’d be quite annoyed,” replies the deputy senior proctor at the university, and fellow and tutor for St Edmund’s College. “But actually the 15 minutes of fame has been quite exciting for me because I’ve been contacted by a number of colleagues and friends who I haven’t heard from for quite a while.

“It’s brought the community together, which was already happening in terms of doing shopping for each other, getting garden supplies delivered, there’s a baker in the street which is nice – we might even do a Zoom carol service.”