The architectural evolution of Selwyn College, Cambridge

Selwyn College, founded in 1882, was one of a group of new institutions that quietly transformed both the intellectual and physical landscape of Cambridge in the later 19th century. It was founded as a memorial to the widely admired missionary George Selwyn (1809–78), the first Anglican Bishop of New Zealand (and subsequently the Bishop of Lichfield, where his tile-clad burial chapel is a notable feature of the cathedral). The college was intended to appeal to men from professional and clerical families of more modest means and educate them as missionary priests. This role in the training of clergy echoed the purpose of many of the great medieval foundations of the university. Despite its title, however, it initially had the status of a ‘public hostel’ and only achieved full collegiate status in 1958.

Even at the time of its first foundation, the Anglican Church was in retreat at Cambridge University. Crucial to this process was the Universities Tests Act of 1871, which removed restrictions that prevented non Anglicans — and non-Christians — from either graduating or holding fellowships.

Eventually, Selwyn College evolved away from its Anglican roots, expanding both its academic range and numbers. In the process, albeit maintaining a strong tradition in theology, it has developed by stages into a diverse and mainstream institution within the university. In 1976, it was among the earliest colleges to admit women. For more than a century, it has shared chapel services with next-door Newnham, one of Cambridge’s two remaining women’s colleges. Today, the numbers of men and women at Selwyn are roughly equal and, in 2025, its first female master, Suzanne Raine, was appointed.

The evolving character of the college as an institution is reflected in the layers of its architecture, which have been discussed — together with many unexecuted projects — in Mike Good’s Selwyn Celebrated, 1882–2007. This complements the standard institutional and cultural history of the foundation, Selwyn College: A History (1994) by W. R. Brock and P. H. M. Cooper.

The first college buildings were designed by Sir Arthur Blomfield, a son of the Bishop of London, then at the height of his reputation as one of the leading church architects of his day. His buildings in both Oxford and Cambridge are surprisingly varied in character and materials, ranging from the 1868 Italianate St Barnabas Jericho, Oxford, modelled on the cathedral at Torcello, to brick, neo-Jacobean Master’s Lodge at Emmanuel College, Cambridge (1873–74, demolished in 1963). Architectural style was a matter of great importance and the latter is carefully distinct from Wren’s Kettonstone Chapel and cloister range.

It was perhaps inevitable, however, that Selwyn would be cast in late English Gothic and Tudor idiom. Such ‘collegiate Gothic’ was a mainstay for the design of the educational institutions of the Anglican Church for much of the 19th century, not merely in Oxford and Cambridge, but across the Empire. Blomfield’s stylistic vision strayed into the Stuart period as well, presumably a reflection of his own education at Trinity College, Cambridge. At the same moment from 1875, Newnham was deliberately and pointedly blazing an alternative, non-conformist trail in its adoption of the Queen Anne style of about 1700.

Blomfield’s plans for Selwyn were only partially realised, but he undoubtedly succeeded in setting the character of the college as we see it today. The tall, red-brick entrance range was completed by 1881–82, with a central gatehouse evocative of several older Oxbridge Colleges (Fig 2). A northern range, in very similar style, was completed in 1889. Hall and chapel were first provided in a temporary structure.

Selwyn’s first master — the Revd and Hon Arthur Lyttelton, son of a government minister — occupied an adapted part of the front range with his family, but a new Master’s Lodge, like a large rectory, with a finely detailed porch in a Perpendicular Gothic spirit, was completed by 1884. This was followed next, not, as might be expected, by a new main hall, but by the chapel. This soaring presence, in brick and banded stone, designed by Blomfield, nods to King’s College in its design (Fig 1). It is also placed directly opposite the entrance in a striking departure from the norms of Cambridge collegiate planning; the master’s lodge and hall are usually opposite the entrance and chapels to one side.

The interior of the chapel (Fig 3) has a lofty elegance that echoes the 1889–91 work of G. F. Bodley at Queens’ College; they share the same later English Gothic architecture. The Selwyn Chapel cost £10,700, with £3,000 being given by the College’s senior tutor, the Revd T. H. Orpen. At its consecration, the Cambridge Chronicle of October 18, 1895, noted: ‘Selwyn is not only one of the youngest, but [also] one of the smallest Colleges of the University, and it says much for the generosity and self-denying character of its past and present members that so handsome a Chapel should have been erected.’ The college ran into debt to pay for it, but had the debt cancelled after a gift from Bishop Edmund Hobhouse.

The finely carved oak stalls were added incrementally, reaching their full extent in the early 1950s; the lively carving of the handrests of the early stalls have a series of impish figures, some with heads of leading statesmen of the time, including Lord Salisbury, Lord Morley and Sir William Harcourt. The west window stained glass of Christ enthroned is by Kempe. A sculpture of three figures over the high altar depicting the Ascension, by Karin Jonzen, was commissioned with advice from Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and added in 1958.

Blomfield had hoped that a library would sit on the north side of the chapel, as a pendant to the Master’s Lodge; each linked by a handsome section of brick cloister. This was not realised before Blomfield’s death in 1899, the library being accommodated in the former temporary chapel, until the 1920s. Blomfield had also envisaged a grand new dining hall for the college; instead, the commission for this went in 1908 to Grayson and Ould (principally Edward Ould), who produced a brick-and-stone work of considerable presence in a frank, early-17th-century style (the designs being published in The Builder, November 30, 1907). The ornate stone detail, with a frieze carved with the initials of college officers and major donors, gives an additional liveliness to this early-20th-century addition.

Grayson and Ould was a Liverpool-based practice that made its reputation working on Port Sunlight for Lord Leverhulme and his family, but had designed a substantial new building for Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in the 1890s, which may have provided the spur for the Selwyn commission.

The vast new hall is elevated over the kitchens that served the temporary space (originally, the lawn was also sunken at a lower level). As with the chapel, the hall could be described as a bid for status and reputation, more a statement of aspiration than a measure of the college’s means. Running east-west, it is approached by a fine T-plan stone staircase, which adds a touch of theatre to the whole court. Its fine interior is finished in panelling, some reused from vats at the derelict Magdalene College brewery, and an open timber roof in the Jacobean manner with decorative plasterwork featuring armorial details (Fig 6).

The west end has a handsome pedimented panelled centrepiece of late-17th-century date, originally a reredos designed by Wren’s Office removed from the Anglican church in Rotterdam, which was demolished in 1913. Its presence in the space contributes to a character that echoes that of many Cambridge halls of earlier dates that were repanelled in the late 17th and early to mid 18th century. At the east end is a surprisingly traditional-looking hall screen; the original plan shows that only one arch served as an entrance, the other operating as a kind of service lobby. At the west end of the hall is the old Senior Combination Room, handsomely panelled in oak with a bolection-moulded fireplace to continue the late-17th-century theme.

The next major addition was the 1929–30 library to the north of the front range of Old Court, a much-reduced version of an ambitious neo-Wren design first proposed for the garden site to the north of the Chapel (where Blomfield had intended it); the design was by T. H. Lyon, director of Design at the Cambridge School of Architecture from 1920–36 and the architect of several neo-Georgian and neo-Wren buildings in the city, including the memorable panelled interior of the Chapel of Sidney Sussex, completed in about 1923.

On the west side of Grange Road, the extensive, Modernist Cripps Court of 1968–69 (funded by the Cripps Foundation) hugely extended Selwyn’s accommodation — replacing older houses, but sparing the college’s gardens to the north of the chapel from development. Designs by Sir James Stirling from 1959 had been set aside and the final buildings were by Gordon Woollatt, with some walls of flint and brick. In 1963–64, Sir Stirrat Johnson-Marshall, former chief architect to the Ministry of Education, designed new Modernist combination rooms and Fellow sets at the west end of the hall range with a bay window, facing the Old Court, in a nod to a Tudor spirit.

In more recent years, Ann’s Court — designed by leading modern neo-Classicist practice Demetri Porphyrios Associates — added a new, open three-sided court, in brick and stone, in a style informed by mid- to late-17th-century English Classical tradition. Demetri Porphyrios Associates has also designed significant buildings at Magdalen, Oxford, including the Grove Quadrangle in 1994–99, as well as Whitman College, in a traditional collegiate Gothic style, for Princeton University in the US (completed 2007). The executant architects at Selwyn were CMC Architects.

The first range of Ann’s Court, of three storeys with an attic level, providing accommodation and administrative offices was completed in 2005. A second range, with further student accommodation, followed in 2009. Both buildings were generously funded by a foundation set up by Chris and Ann Dobson. A Selwyn graduate, Dr Dobson had met Ann, a nurse, when at Cambridge and they created a charitable foundation after selling his successful semiconductor equipment business. The last section was completed in 2021, with a new lecture hall with library over. The Quarry Whitehouse Auditorium and Bartlam Library — named after additional benefactors — are located (with their own distinct entrances), in a tall range with a strong presence that stands independently (Fig 4).

Within the court, the auditorium and library building has its own attached tower, rising to a circular bronze lantern suggestive of a Roman lighthouse of the tradition of the Tower of Hercules in Galicia — a new landmark. The executant architects were AMA Architects. Ann’s Court, with its handmade Coleford brick, pedimented dormers and gables, sits well beside the mostly brick Old Court to its south. Its deep brick chimneys echo traditional design and serve modern functions, housing ventilation and extraction vents for student rooms. The two Queen Anne Revival-style villas on the north side of the court, both student accommodation, will be linked by a one-storey building in work yet to be completed.

Consciously traditionalist, Porphyrios’s Ann’s Court has a strong identity of its own that is both reminiscent of the American Ivy League universities and suggestive of institutional confidence. The clean-cut Portland-stone arcades (Fig 5) are especially memorable and evocative of the work of Wren in Cambridge and Oxford, as well as providing shelter from rain and sun. The debate about approaches to additions to historic Cambridge colleges is always a lively one, but Selwyn’s new court, stately and commodious, is a good demonstration of the enduring value of inventive modern Classical design.

Acknowledgements: Peter Fox, Elizabeth Stratton

This feature originally appeared in the July 8, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.