The Cockerell Building – known simply as the Library by many – was originally built to house part of the University Library which remained there until 1935 on the opening of the new building to the west of the city. It then became the University Squire Law Library until that in turn moved to its own purpose-built structure, Norman Foster’s Law Faculty building on the Sidgwick site. The College decided in 1987 to take on a 350-year lease from the University and as a result now operates one of the most magnificent buildings in the city, perfectly situated just outside Caius Court. 

The building was designed in 1836 by C.R. Cockerell and built in 1837-40. In this case, he had earlier won a competition for a monumental courtyard structure that was to have replaced the whole of the Old Schools; the University was, however, unable to agree on the future of the courtyard, and so only the northern wing of the project was built. 

The Library drew its architectural ideas from some of the grander monuments and ideal schemes of the period. Historians have seen in it, for example, an eastern elevation based on a Roman triumphal arch and the idiosyncratic London baroque churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor, and in its interior a famous visionary scheme for a massive national library by Etienne-Louis Boullée designed in the aftermath of the French Revolution; or, more realistically, a recent composition by William Playfair for the University of Edinburgh. The most original element of the principal reading room on the first floor is its latticed barrel-vaulted ceiling. Below the main space there is a low room with Doric columns, designed originally for the Museum of Minerology. 

Various changes have been made to the Library since it first opened. The main door at the eastern end was inserted in 1904 and the galleries have been altered at least three times: once in the 1890s; then again by Murray Easton in the 1930s, when he modified much of the interior of the Old Schools after the University Library moved out; and finally as part of the restoration, overhaul and modernisation of the building by Mark Wilkinson of Donald Insall Associates, completed in 1996 as the College took possession. 

ARCHITECT 

Charles Robert Cockerell (1788–1863) was the most distinguished member of a family of architects and one of the very few who continued to develop and practise in a monumental classical style once the gothic revival had otherwise taken hold of English architecture. He travelled widely to see ancient classical sites in his youth and in fact was a founder member of the Travellers’ Club in Pall Mall, London. His other executed monumental design was for the Ashmolean Museum and Taylorian Institute in Oxford of 1841-45. St George’s Hall in Liverpool was enhanced and completed by Cockerell after the early death of its architect Harvey Elmes in 1847 and he also designed a fine branch of the Bank of England in the city. In his lifetime his work was loudly reviled by the keenest gothic revivalists but as time passes, its originality and subtlety have won increasing approbation: he possibly forms more of a part of the story of European nineteenth-century architecture than of the British. He was the first architect to be awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, in 1848, but this time the College cannot claim any credit for it; however, Cockerell’s archaeological enthusiasms and interests are captured in the design of the Fellows’ Dining Room (see Gonville Court). 

For John Murray Easton, see: St Michael’s Court 

For Donald Insall Associates, see: West Road 

FURTHER READING 

Watkin, David, The Life and Work of C. R. Cockerell. London, Zwemmer (1974).