Tree Court is dominated by the magnificent student residence and office accommodation building designed by Alfred Waterhouse. The College chose this design from a pair of alternatives first submitted by the architect in 1867. The style of the building is French Renaissance, with features such as the ornamental staircase in the north-east corner of the court derived from the French chateaux of the Loire where Waterhouse had been an avid sketcher of buildings of this type. The heads within roundels along the Trinity Street front are of famous Caians and the statues below the imposing King’s Parade tower depict the two eponymous founders and William Bateman, Bishop of Norwich, who contributed to the completion of Gonville’s original hall. Waterhouse’s new building provided the College with 57 sets, including two for Fellows, and there were to have been three chemistry laboratories at the top of the tower. The building still houses students although some of the rooms have been converted into offices. At the same time, Waterhouse refronted the mediaeval northern range on the west side of Tree Court with an irregular, low and almost village-like façade.

Tree Court replaced a set of gardens within an irregular courtyard that had, on its eastern and northern sides, an early seventeenth-century three-storey pair of linked buildings. These were named Perse and Legge after their benefactors and can be seen in David Loggan’s engraving of 1690. Engravings of Trinity Street from the pre-Waterhouse era show the original Gate of Humility as a classical doorway under a scrolled pediment with, surprisingly, a round-arched inner archivolt as if from a building in a different style, all situated in a tall, plain garden wall. The gate was moved into the Master’s Garden when the new building went up and it has remained there to this day.

If you look above the internal arch ahead of you when entering the College today from the porters’ lodge, you will see that Waterhouse included the word Humilitatis to make a Gate of Humility of his own, and the names of Perse and Legge are immortalised with a statue and an inscription on S and Q staircases respectively. The name Tree Court was in fact intended as a temporary one until a new benefactor could be found to name it after. Until very recently there was an avenue of trees that ran from the porters’ lodge to the Gate of Virtue, a significant axis as it roughly corresponded to the location of an old path called Henneye Lane. 

Visitors to the College often ask why the main entrance into it is under a modest arch from Trinity Street and not from under the Great Gate at the base of Waterhouse’s tower. For many years, this latter archway was blocked by a massive timber door which almost never seemed to be open. In fact the porters’ lodge was located here until 1895 when it was moved onto the Trinity Street side. The are two reasons why this might have happened: one is that the space outside the Senate House was noisy and smelly because of the horse-drawn cab rank stationed there; the other is that a central location within the block would also more conveniently serve the new College accommodation planned for the other side of Trinity Street. The College’s Senior Fellow Michael Prichard has told this story in a fascinating book, Waterhouse and His Gate, illustrated by photography by Yao Liang and available in the College library, which also revealed how Waterhouse’s original iron gates below the tower were found, restored and rehung in 2009. Waterhouse also designed a small iron gate and tympanum for his new Gate of Humility that was never installed and, in modified form, can be seen today at the southern entrance to Trinity Hall, facing the western end of Senate House Passage. 

For the Gate of Virtue, see Caius Court. 

Connoisseurs of modernist architecture in Cambridge will be interested to know that the discreet Fellows’ bicycle shed, scarcely visible along the southern wall against Senate House Passage, was the work of Christophe Grillet, architect and fellow of the College, who died at the age of 86 in 2012. It is one of the few surviving structures by his practice Lyster, Grillet & Harding which once appeared in many Cambridge colleges but which have gradually been replaced; their sports pavilion for Trinity College in Grange Road and the Needham Institute in Sylvester Road are now the only major survivors. The practice also designed a small, elegant, glazed atrium for Sinclair Research at 25 Willis Road that now houses a data centre for Anglia Ruskin University. 

ARCHITECT 

Alfred Waterhouse (1830-1905) was one of the most highly regarded and prolific British architects of the later Victorian period. Originally from Manchester, when commissioned by the College he had recently won a high-profile competition for the design for the city’s Town Hall, but he had also completed the Cambridge Union Society building in Round Church Street. In Cambridge he designed Girton College, built over decades from 1872, as well as several significant buildings for Pembroke College in the 1870s and a residential block for Jesus College which is contemporaneous with Tree Court. Foster’s, now Lloyds, Bank in the centre of the city, with its impressive banking hall, is another of his projects. Waterhouse had a reputation as an effective planner of large complex buildings and he designed many hospital and university buildings across the country. The Natural History Museum in London (1873) is probably his best known work; he also designed impressive premises for the Prudential Assurance company in the major cities. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1878. Late in life he was in demand as an influential judge of architectural competitions: in 1895 it was he who selected the winning design for the exuberant baroque design for Cardiff City Hall. 

FURTHER READING Cunningham, Colin, & Prudence Waterhouse, Alfred Waterhouse 1830–1905: Biography of a Practice. Oxford, OUP, 1992.