Smalltown is at Sawston's Accelerator Park — a business park on the southern edge of Cambridge, which is not a description designed to inspire enthusiasm. Set that aside. What Ben and Ed have built at Sawston is a genuinely excellent artisan bakery and coffee bar that would hold its own anywhere in Cambridge city centre, and is all the more impressive for being in a context that demands better than it usually gets.
The Sawston site is Smalltown's second café, opened in 2023 when they moved their commercial bakery operation to Accelerator Park. The Clare original came first; Sawston is the larger, more accessible operation — and the coffee and baking are exactly what you'd want from people who take both seriously enough to build a second location around them.
"Freshly baked bread, pastries and cakes, beautiful coffee, and a daily offering of focaccia sandwiches and toasties."
— SmalltownSmalltown bakes everything fresh daily: sourdough, pastries, cakes, focaccia sandwiches and toasties that change with what's good. The baking ethos is straightforward — proper ingredients, proper technique, nothing that doesn't need to be there. The bread is the anchor and it's excellent; the pastry programme is more variable but reliably delivers something worth having.
Bags of coffee are available on the retail shelf alongside bread for taking home — the kind of addition that makes a morning trip feel like a proper grocery run.
Smalltown's Missing Bean collaboration places them firmly in serious speciality coffee company. Missing Bean — the Oxford roaster with a reputation that stretches well beyond Oxfordshire — brings the kind of rigorous sourcing and roasting approach that makes the cup here noticeably better than the business park context might suggest.
The espresso programme is well-executed, the filter options are worth exploring, and the staff know what they're talking about. This is coffee that has been thought about, which is exactly what a long day at a business park warrants.
The weekday crowd is largely the Accelerator Park workforce, which keeps the atmosphere brisk in the mornings and calmer through the afternoon. Weekends bring a different crowd — people who've made a specific trip for the baking and the coffee, which is a good sign. Open Monday to Friday from 7:30am to 3:30pm, Saturday and Sunday from 9am to 3pm.
The Missing Bean relationship alone would get Smalltown noticed; the quality of the in-house baking confirms it belongs on this list. This is a place that has chosen to be seriously good in a context that didn't demand it — and that kind of deliberate quality, wherever it turns up, is exactly what Dialled is for. Five miles south of Cambridge and worth every minute of the drive.
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