St Michael’s Court, on the other side of Trinity Street from the Old Courts, consists of two adjoined buildings in contrasting style which fold around the northern and eastern sides of the fourteenth-century Church of St Michael. In 1887 the College bought the inner row of terraced houses in Rose Crescent and from 1901 the architects Aston Webb and Ingress Bell began to build what is now the old part of St Michael’s Court. The Edwardian period, under the mastership of E.S. Roberts, was one of rapid change in the College, and one tangible sign of this was that the new building would include bathrooms for the first time. The rooms in general were less austere than those in Tree Court and the views in all directions lively and picturesque. 

The building is designed in a soft-edged gothic style with many hints of late-century romanticism in its details and sculpture (by W.S. Frith). At the time of the commission, Webb had recently designed new premises for Christ’s Hospital, the boarding school, near Horsham in Sussex and was up-to-date with the design of modern and hygienic institutional buildings. Waterhouse may have recommended him to the College after awarding him first prize for his design for the Victoria Law Courts in Birmingham. The building was evidently considered to be successful because a few years later King’s College commissioned Webb to design the building now named after him in the same style. In 1980 the Cambridge architects David Roberts and Geoffrey Clarke cleverly redesigned the ground floor of the Rose Crescent side into shops with new doors and delicate bronze display windows, following suggestions by the Bursar, Air Vice-Marshal Reggie Bullen. 

In 1934 the College extended St Michael’s Court, completing the rebuilding of the western side of Rose Crescent and providing a new building facing Market Hill. The architect was J. Murray Easton, who designed many departmental buildings for the University and in fact shortly after this project converted former library areas in the Old Schools into University offices and meeting rooms. The new College building was built in two styles and is faced in two types of stone. The Portland stone elevation to Market Hill is in the practice’s characteristic streamlined style, over a modern shopping arcade, but on the court side and at the point where the building adjoins the older one, it is faced with Ketton stone and has Georgian type sash windows. To the surprise of the College’s historian Professor Christopher Brooke, this building, or at any rate the modern-looking part, was widely acclaimed by critics when it was unveiled. 

Back in 1887 when the College first acquired the western side of Rose Crescent, it had hoped to buy both sides of the street but the cost was prohibitive. In 2024 this was finally achieved, and the College is planning further development of the areas behind the shops between Market Hill and Green Street, to be known as Radcliffe Court. 

ARCHITECTS AND SCULPTOR 

John Murray Easton (1889-1975), originally from Aberdeen, worked in partnership with the American-born architect Howard Robertson (1888-1979) and designed many University buildings both before and after the Second World War in Cambridge, including the wings added for the Department of Zoology (1933-34) to E.S. Prior’s building in Downing Street; the Anatomy Building on the Downing site (1938); and the Baker Building which forms the front part of the Department of Engineering in Trumpington Street (1949-52). They also designed hospital buildings, including the first block of the new Addenbrooke’s Hospital from 1960, and perhaps most prominent of all, the Lawrence Hall of the Royal Horticultural Society in Westminster (1925-28) with its striking parabolic arches; much later, Robertson designed the Shell Centre (1957-1962) on the South Bank of the River Thames in London. They also designed the Bank of England’s printing works in Debden, Essex (1956). Their buildings generally have a streamlined, industrial appearance but surprisingly they also designed a few expensive private houses, including one facing the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as the famous ‘jazz-moderne’ stainless steel entrance canopy to the Savoy Hotel. Both Easton and Robertson were awarded, separately, the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. 

The sculptor W.S. Frith (1850–1924) was an architectural sculptor who frequently worked with Webb. He played a leading role in the New Sculpture movement which broke away from stiff high Victorian forms in the 1880s in favour of relaxed, sometimes emotive figures with a tendency towards European symbolism or Art Nouveau.

David Roberts (1911-1982) was a prolific and influential Cambridge architect who also taught in the Department of Architecture. His buildings were generally in a modest version of the brutalist style, but Mallory Court, his project for Magdalene College, behind the row of shops on the western side of Magdalene Street, impressed many with its self-effacing combination of conversion and small-scale intervention. Geoffrey Clarke was a former student who joined him in 1964. 

Sir Aston Webb (1849–1930) was born in Clapham and set up in independent practice in 1873. He made his name through winning high profile architectural competitions, including that in 1899 for the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, a vast project that was already occupying him when he designed St Michael’s Court. He refaced Buckingham Palace and designed the new Mall layout, including Admiralty Arch, again as a result of competition wins. His work at universities elsewhere includes the imposing central crescent of Birmingham (from 1902). In 1905 he became the third of the architects commissioned by the College to subsequently receive the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Ingress Bell (1837–1914) was an architect of barrack buildings who became a consulting architect to the Crown Agents in 1882 and in that capacity was introduced to Webb whom he then joined in partnership. 

FURTHER READING 

Neither Aston Webb nor Easton & Robertson have monographs but in the meantime, Ian Dungavell’s doctoral thesis is the best source for Webb: 

Dungavell, Ian, ‘The architectural career of Sir Aston Webb (1849-1930)’ [PhD thesis], University of London, Royal Holloway & Bedford New College,1999, available through the library of the RIBA. 

For W.S. Frith, see: Beattie, Susan, The New Sculpture. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1983.