Gonville Court · The Senior and Junior Parlours · the Hall · The Senior Combination Rooms 

Gonville Court is a fascinating palimpsest, with fine architecture from several centuries grafted together to form a memorable set of spaces and some very remarkable interiors. 

This court formed the nucleus of Gonville Hall after Edmund Gonville’s original foundation moved here in 1353, and its original form can be seen in David Loggan’s print of 1690. The nucleus of the domestic buildings including the hall and library began on the western side in the 1420s and had reached the eastern wing by the 1490s. It then resembled many other mediaeval college courts with arched upper windows and a gateway onto Trinity Lane. In the 1750s the court took on its present appearance when Sir James Burrough remodelled the fronts of the residential wings to their present appearance, replacing the old windows with up-to-date double-hung, vertical sliding sashes – a process which went on in many colleges at the time. The Senior Parlour, on the first floor of the northern side of the court, retains its fine eighteenth-century appearance. The Junior Parlour, which has equally fine but Victorian panelling displaced from the Hall, is also located on the northern side of the court.

 The western side has a complex building history. The greater part of the western edge of the College site is taken up by the present Hall, designed by Anthony Salvin from 1852-3. It is thought to have been modelled on that of Middle Temple in London and has a fine double-hammerbeam roof, but its real triumph is the extraordinary way in which Salvin created a sophisticated three-dimensional layout on a highly constricted site. He was by then an accomplished country house architect and this gave him an insight into the planning of spaces for multiple purposes. His second-floor hall sits over two storeys of kitchens, kitchen offices and storage spaces accessed from Trinity Lane; on entering Salvin’s wing from the court, a double staircase divides students from fellows and takes each of them separately up yet more stairs to reach the ‘low’ and ‘high’ ends of the hall respectively. 

The Hall has however been changed a great deal since Salvin’s day. The tall gothic southern window, the panelling, the height of the windows, the bay window at the ‘high’ end, the design of the corbels and the northern end were significantly altered by E.P. Warren in 1908-10, when he also added the screen, and further changes were introduced by John Simpson in the 1990s. 

Photo credit to Dan White.

Salvin had designed at the same time a library in the north-west corner of the site. When the College moved into the former University Law Library in 1996, this space was remodelled into the new Fellows’ Dining Room and the Lord Colyton Hall, extensions to the set of senior combination rooms that face into the Court. This work was carried out under the direction of the Master Neil McKendrick by Simpson, who finished each part of it in a different style. The Lord Colyton Hall takes it form and style from College’s original dining hall on the site as remodelled by Sir John Soane in 1792 and with features inspired by Soane’s work at nearby Wimpole Hall: the oculi, the circular piercings through the arch, probably have their historic origin in Donato Bramante’s late fifteenth-century additions to the church of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan, which Soane may have seen. The Dining Room and all the many decorative details that Simpson designed for it are based on the fourth-century BC temple of Apollo at Bassae, excavated by C.R. Cockerell in 1810-11. The design of the serving counter at the far end was based on the 3rd century B.C. sarcophagus of Lucius Cornelius, from the Tomb of the Scipios, rediscovered in 1780 and now in the Vatican. In the words of the Buildings of England, the Pevsner guide, ‘No-one could accuse architect or college of a loss of nerve here’. Simpson also created a new student servery to the hall, remodelled its screen end, and added the grand staircase leading down from a new bar with a handrail in the form of a serpent, as well as decorative elements and a Soanian skylight to the double staircase. 

The White Combination Room above the ground-floor entrance remains largely unchanged from its nineteenth-century appearance; the ceiling was designed by Warren who at the time of his remodelling of the Hall made many small decorative interventions here and in the Master’s Lodge. The beautiful Panelled Combination Room to its south, however, was, created in 1903-05 by the leading arts and crafts architect Arnold Mitchell and reestablished the form of the old library, an inspired appointment by the Fellows. The room was panelled with timber from HMS Wellington, which had served as the flagship of the Baltic Fleet in the Crimean War. The two larger moulded beams are thought to be mid-fifteenth century and the rest were probably inserted by Dr Caius in about 1567. This room has been described as one of the finest Edwardian smoking rooms in Cambridge. 

ARCHITECTS 

Sir James Burrough (1691-1764) was a polymath and amateur architect from Bury St Edmunds who was much involved in building projects in Cambridge, including in some way participating in early designs for the Senate House. He remodelled the hall of Queens’ College in the 1730s, designed a building for and refronted part of the mediaeval court in Peterhouse, and some years later worked in a similar way at Trinity Hall. 

Arnold Mitchell (1864-1944) designed some of the most attractive Edwardian houses, mostly in a style which combined decorative features from the early eighteenth century with an arts and crafts sensibility; he also worked extensively abroad. A prize-winning student, he trained with Ernest George & Peto, an office which nurtured some of the greatest talents of its generation. Mitchell’s houses, some of which can be seen in the suburbs of Cambridge, often incorporated ornamental plasterwork, some by leading artists in the medium such as George Bankart. For all their picturesque beauty, Mitchell’s houses were designed to incorporate modern technology and were built to very high standards. He also designed University College School in Hampstead in 1907, railway stations in South America, and Lotts children’s building bricks. 

Anthony Salvin (1799-1891) was a leading Victorian country house architect who designed or remodelled several important buildings in Cambridge. In addition to his work for Caius, he restored the Round Church to its current form and refronted the master’s lodge of Trinity College. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he adapted quickly and effectively to the new ‘true’ gothic revival architecture of the 1830s, although he was an unsuccessful competitor for the design of the new Houses of Parliament in 1835. As his career developed, he designed a number of very large new country houses with sophisticated plans and also had a substantial practice in church restoration. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1863. 

John Simpson CVO (born 1954) is one of the world’s leading contemporary classical architects, although his work also includes the Tudor-gothick Whittle Building at Peterhouse. Prominent amongst his contributions to Cambridge is the new front wing of the University Arms Hotel, alongside Parker’s Piece in Regent Street. A visiting professor at the University, he was the architect for the refronting and remodelling of the King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace in London. 

Edward Prioleau Warren (1856-1937) was an architect who trained with the leading Gothic Revival architects G.F. Bodley and Thomas Garner in the early 1880s. He practised from a curious house in the internal corner at the junction of Cowley Street and Barton Street in Westminster and was one of several architects who protested loudly when the entire area was remodelled into its current idealised ‘Queen Anne’ form at the start of the twentieth century; in Great College Street, just along the street from the site of his office, there is a somewhat utilitarian building that he designed for Westminster School. He was the architect for the Department of Pathology in Cambridge and also practised extensively in Oxford; he also advised the novelist Henry James on changes to his home, Lamb House, in Rye in East Sussex. His brother-in-law Philip Morrell was the husband of Lady Ottoline, the Bloomsbury chatelaine. He was a ‘brother’ of the Art Workers’ Guild and his portrait can be seen in their hall in Queen Square, London. 

For C.R. Cockerell, see: The Library 

FURTHER READING 

Allibone, Jill, Anthony Salvin: Pioneer of Gothic Revival Architecture. Cambridge, James Clarke & Co (The Lutterworth Press), 1988. 

Sherriff, Claire, ‘Arnold Mitchell (1863-1944), “Fecundity” and “Versatility” in an early twentieth century architect’. Architectural History 55 (2012),199-235. 

Watkin, David, The Architecture of John Simpson: The Timeless Language of Classicism. New York: Rizzoli, 2015.