West Road Harvey Court · The Stephen Hawking Building · Newnham Cottage · Finella 

Harvey Court is one of the few twentieth-century buildings in Cambridge that is internationally renowned. It is attributed to Professor Sir Leslie Martin, but Martin’s role in his studio was generally one of providing inspiration and oversight to those who worked with him, and in this case the designer of the building was Patrick Hodgkinson. Nevertheless, it is a clear demonstration of Martin’s own ideas about rational ways of designing low-rise, dense housing that were later developed through the Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies that he founded in Cambridge in 1967. 

Harvey Court was completed on the site of a nineteenth-century villa in 1962 as undergraduate sets, designed around a court on the edge of the College garden with a common room and top-lit subterranean breakfast room at its centre. Only a small number of rooms in the south-east corner enjoyed a garden view: the others faced each other through full height window walls and across public terraces, which students had asked for but in practice found alarming. Neither this nor the technical problems of the building however have ever dampened the enthusiasm of critics and architectural historians for what they see as remarkable and rare brick example of mid-century brutalism with a clear intellectual driving concept behind it. The section of the building creates a grand colonnade around the outside of it, and from West Road it is possible to see the forms of the staircases as they rise up to reach the upper rooms. The building is also associated with Colin St John Wilson who was working alongside Hodgkinson for Martin at the time, and who saw in it a development of the architecture of Alvar Aalto which he greatly admired, not only in the use of brick but also, more literally, in the open steps that connect the inner court to the garden. This for him was reminiscent of the much more organic treatment of the same idea at Aalto’s Säynätsalo town hall, completed in 1952. 

Martin, the seventh of Caius’ RIBA Gold Medal architects, achieved national notoriety with his conceptual plan for government offices in Whitehall, published in 1965, which proposed replacing all the Victorian and Edwardian masterpieces in the area with what were essentially a large number of Harvey Courts, knitted together. The outrage caused by the publication of a photograph of a model for the scheme led to the swift abandonment of the project. 

Harvey Court was meticulously restored in 2011 by Levitt Bernstein; David Levitt and David Bernstein had met when working in Hodgkinson’s practice in the 1960s. 

The Stephen Hawking Building, opened in 2003, was designed by Mark Wilkinson of Donald Insall Associates and was built on the site of the West House Hotel. It provides accommodation for students and fellows, the latter in a glazed penthouse which sits back from the Ancaster stone facades to create a continuous rooftop terrace. The sinuous form of the building was planned to avoid felling the two fine specimen trees that had survived the rebuilding by the University and colleges of this former area of grand villas and ornamental gardens. The building is notable for the high quality of construction detailing and finishes and for its sensitive environmental design.

Newnham Cottage, which is incorporated into the College garden, is the villa designed and built for himself around 1805 by William Wilkins senior. The house is typical of the superior type of villa of the Regency period that suited both parsonage houses and ‘cottage residences’ for the gentry. It has three principal rooms that face a garden: a wide central bay for the drawing room with symmetrical shallow wings projecting either side of it, all linked by a corridor on their northern side, a planning device that became popular as the century progressed. Additions have been made to the house, including the creation of an enclosed passage from Queen’s Road and the two northern wings. The later cast iron verandah and shutters on the garden front complete the picturesque appearance of the house today. 

Finella is as well known as Harvey Court in some circles. This is an early Victorian house to the south of Newnham Cottage which in 1927-29 was transformed internally by Raymond McGrath, a young Australian architect, for Mansfield Forbes, a fellow of Clare College who had rented it from Gonville and Caius. This interior, which partially survives, was an extravaganza of metallic and monochrome finishes, lavender lacquer, maroon rubber edged in yellow, tented ceilings and various sculptured and glass objects referring to the myth of Finella, the pictish queen who threw herself to her death over a waterfall. When complete, the house hosted large numbers of curious visitors, from schools and workers’ associations as much as from Forbes’ intellectual connections. The house today provides residences and a meeting room for fellows of the College. 

ARCHITECTS 

Patrick Hodgkinson (1930-2016) joined Leslie Martin’s studio after studying at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and spending six months in the office of Alvar Aalto in Finland. After working on Harvey Court, he remained with Martin for the design of the Law Library in Oxford, and then, as an independent architect, designed the Brunswick centre in Bloomsbury, London, where the ideas he experimented with at Caius were developed into a concrete megastructure with stacked and receding terraces of flats that occupied an entire urban block. He later became professor of architecture at the University of Bath. 

Sir Leslie Martin (1908-2000) was born in Manchester and worked in partnership with his wife, Sadie Speight. After acting as a young and modernising head of the Hull College of Art, he worked during the Second World War as an architect for the London Midland Scottish Railway. In 1948 he was appointed deputy architect to the London County Council and in that capacity he supervised the design of the Royal Festival Hall; the principal designer of the building was Peter Moro, and their relationship was described by them as analogous to Martin as ‘composer’ and Moro as ‘leader of the orchestra’ – very similar to how he regularly operated on other projects for which he became responsible, including Harvey Court. In 1956 he became Cambridge’s first Professor of Architecture and head of department, marking the start of an exceptionally active period as an architectural education reformer and as an adviser to governments and universities. In his late 70s he designed Cambridge’s Faculty of Music. 

Sir Donald Insall (born 1926) is the founder of what is today Donald Insall Associates, widely considered to be one of the first and most distinguished practices in the world to specialise in authentic building conservation and restoration based on the highest standards of professional research. The practice has at various times acted as consultant for many national landmarks including the Palace of Westminster. Mark Wilkinson joined DIA in 1978 and led its Cambridge office until his retirement, taking responsibility during that period for many prominent restoration projects and new buildings. 

David Levitt (born 1936) and David Bernstein (1937-2018) founded their practice in 1968 after for working for Patrick Hodgkinson on the Brunswick Centre. Bernstein, who was born in New York, had been a student of Louis Kahn at the University, of Pennsylvania in 1962. They achieved national fame for the design of the new Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester in 1976, which took the form of a freestanding structure that seemed to borrow its imagery from Apollo 11’s lunar module. In 2006 the practice completed the restoration of Hodgkinson’s Brunswick Centre. 

Raymond McGrath (1903-1977) was born in New South Wales and arrived in Britain with a scholarship to study at the Westminster School of Art. After Finella, he worked on interiors for the new Broadcasting House in London, becoming one of several talented avant-garde designers and architects who created its original recording studios. His principal architectural work was St Anne’s Court, a striking white modernist house in Chertsey, Surrey, designed on a plan of a series of concentric circles. He later became principal architect to the Irish Office of Works. 

For William Wilkins senior, see: The Chapel and Master’s Lodge 

FURTHER READING 

Brittain-Catlin, Timothy, The English Parsonage in the Early Nineteenth Century. Reading: Spire Books, 2008. 

Carolin, Peter et al, ‘Leslie Martin: 1908-2000’. Architecture Research Quarterly 4.4 (2000); 295-320.

 Darling, Elizabeth, ‘Finella, Mansfield Forbes, Raymond McGrath, and Modernist Architecture in Britain’. Journal of British Studies 50, (January 2011), 125-155. 

Insall, Donald, Living Buildings: Architectural Conservation: Philosophy, Principles and Practice, Mulgrave (Victoria, Australia): Images, 2008. 

Martin, Leslie, Buildings & Ideas 1933-83 from the Studio of Leslie Martin & his Associates. Cambridge: CUP, 1983.