Hinterland

Fancy a crash course in English architecture (and no blisters)? Just take a stroll around Cambridge

Few places in Britain have such a concentration of architectural jewels as Cambridge. The city’s identification with what one is obliged to call “the world-famous chapel of King’s College” can be overwhelming; but Cambridge is no one-hit wonder, as partisans of its other colleges will attest. And, beyond the colleges, there are fine buildings in the town (notably several churches) that illustrate every episode in our architectural history from Saxon times to the present day. From the 17th century onwards, Cambridge offers a roll call of our greatest architects. If you seek a rapid education in English architecture, without traipsing around London, there is possibly no better place to do it.

Long before King’s chapel – a masterpiece of perpendicular – was built, Cambridge had two churches of national importance. The first is St Benet’s, whose Saxon tower is a thousand years old, and which from 1352 until the 1820s served as chapel of my own college, Corpus Christi. The second is the Round Church (one of only five in England) of the Holy Sepulchre, from the early 12th century. Back at Corpus, its Old Court is the oldest continuously inhabited building in Cambridge, and reeks of the medieval. The Old Schools – the university’s administrative centre – is behind King’s chapel, and has a late medieval gatehouse from the 1440s, the precursor of three great Tudor ones in the university, at St John’s, Trinity and Christ’s.

Christopher Wren’s first finished building was the chapel at Pembroke, but the library at Trinity named after him – and built between 1676 and 1691 – is sublime: not just because of Wren’s use of Ketton stone, which alternates between pink and cream and changes with the light, or his classical forms, but because of Grinling Gibbons’s woodwork. Wren wanted to build the Senate House and University Library, which stand at right angles to each opposite the university church, Great St Mary’s. However, the former was built between 1722 and 1730 by James Gibbs, but owing so much to Wren that it might be by him. The old University Library did not come until the late 1830s, built by CR Cockrell and looking rather Regency: the editors of the Cambridgeshire Pevsner detected Hawksmoor’s influence.

Hawksmoor was supposed to build the great stone building now in King’s Great Court; and before him Wren was consulted; but this handsome edifice, resembling a stately home, also went to Gibbs, being built at the same time as his Senate House.

King’s also contains work of the 1820s by William Wilkins, whom I have discussed here as architect of the National Gallery; but his finest Cambridge achievement is the great fortress-like front of Corpus and its New Court behind it, with his exquisite chapel that supplanted St Benet’s. Cambridge expanded greatly in the 1820s, and the largest building at that time in the university, New Court at John’s – a magnificent early gothic revival extravaganza that presents the most marvellous aspect from the river, with its “wedding cake” lantern – was begun in 1827. Wilkins was asked to compete for the commission but declined; it went instead to Thomas Rickman and Henry Hutchinson, whose style owed everything to Wilkins’s. Hutchinson also built another Cambridge landmark, the Bridge of Sighs, which links the older parts of John’s to its New Court.

George Gilbert Scott, the most

From Saxon times to today, it illustrates every episode in our architectural history

celebrated gothic revivalist, built a chapel at John’s the size of a small cathedral. His rival GF Bodley’s All Saint’s, Jesus Lane, from the 1860s, is a short walk east, and unusually in a city of towers has a remarkable steeple. Another great gothicist, Alfred Waterhouse, built at Pembroke and Jesus but his most radical Cambridge building is his first, the Union Society of 1863-65.

I have always been struck by the austerity of Giles Gilbert Scott’s great University Library of 1931-34, with its stunning 157-foot tower and its echoes of Battersea Power Station; it is Cambridge’s finest art-deco building. And Cambridge’s architectural excellence, after a dip in the 1960s and 1970s, continues today: the recent Ann’s Court at Selwyn is tasteful and complementary to the rest of the college. Its new auditorium, library and above all its belvedere show that architecture is evolving successfully in this ancient town.