Buildings – an introduction
Gonville & Caius has a remarkable architectural heritage spanning nearly seven centuries, including designs by no fewer than seven winners of the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
Many of the College's buildings have been described and analysed in detail, so this series of webpages aims to provide a first introduction to them, accompanied by short biographies of the architects and some suggestions for further reading.
The entries have been compiled from a range of authoritative sources, mostly as follows:
Christopher Brooke’s History of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge (The Boydell Press,1985 and available online here.)
Howard Colvin’s A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840 (third edition, Yale UP, 1995)
Mark Girouard’s A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1540-1640 (Yale UP, 2021)
Historic England’s List Entries
The ‘Pevsner’ guide: Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner’s The Buildings of England: Cambridgeshire (Yale UP, 2013)
J.P.C. Roach, 'The colleges and halls: Gonville and Caius', in A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely: Volume 3, the City and University of Cambridge, (London, 1959)
Robert Willis and John Clark, The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, 1886 and available online here.)
and
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Obituaries and first-hand reminiscences.
Various specialist texts which are suggested as further reading on the webpages themselves.
Dr Michael Wood has very generously read these entries and provided corrections, and I would also like to thank Professor Yao Liang for his support for the project; of course, any remaining mistakes are mine.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you find what my old boss used to call ‘intentional errors’ or if you think something significant is missing.
Professor Timothy Brittain-Catlin
Director of Studies in Architecture and Design
