3 - Colleges: buildings, masters, and fellows

Summary

COLLEGES

COLLEGES: RESIDENTIAL COMMUNITIES

Among these narrow, ugly and dirty streets, are tumbled in, as it were at random (for the whole place looks as if it had been dancing to Amphion's music, and he had left off in the middle of a very complicated figure) some of the most beautiful academical buildings in the world. However their style of architecture may vary, according to the period at which they were built or rebuilt, they agree in one essential feature: all the colleges are constructed in quadrangles or courts; and, as in course of years the population of every college except one [Downing], has outgrown the original quadrangle, new courts have been added, so that the larger foundations have three, and one (St. John's) has four courts. Sometimes the ‘old court’, or primitive part of the building presents a handsome front to the largest street near it; but frequently, as if to show its independence of, and contempt for, the town, it retires from the street altogether, showing the passer by only its ugliest wall, and smallest, shabbiest gate.

In thus introducing his account of his undergraduate life in the 1840s Charles Astor Bristed touches on what has always been most significant about Cambridge colleges: their faithfulness to an essentially medieval architectural idiom, many centuries after the Middle Ages ceased. In their style and quadrangular plan the first colleges remind us of late medieval mansions, Haddon Hall or the first buildings at Knole being examples, where impressive gate houses led into courts ranged round with dwellings, and fortification was ceasing to matter.