England Guide
East Anglia
King's College
Opening time: Term time: Mon– Fri 9.30am–3.30pm, Sat 9.30am–3.15pm & Sun 1.15–2.15pm; rest of year: Mon– Sat 9.30am–4.30pm & Sun 10am–5pm
Price: King's College Chapel: £4.50
Address: King's Parade
Telephone: 01223/331 100
Website: www.kings.cam.ac.uk
Henry VI founded King's College in 1441, but he was disappointed with his initial efforts. So, four years later he cleared away half of medieval Cambridge to make room for a much grander foundation. His plans were ambitious, but the Wars of the Roses intervened and by the time of his death in 1471 very little had been finished. Part of the site remained empty for no less than three hundred years and the Great Court complex of today – facing King's Parade from behind a long stone screen – is largely neo-Gothic, built in the 1820s to a design by William Wilkins.
Henry's workmen did, however, start on the college's finest building, the much-celebrated King's College Chapel. Committed to canvas by Turner and Canaletto, and eulogized in no less than three sonnets by Wordsworth, it's now best known for its boys' choir, whose members process across the college grounds during term time in their antiquated garb to sing evensong (Tues– Sat at 5.30pm) and carols on Christmas Eve. The building seems impossibly slender, its streamlined buttresses channelling up to a dainty balustrade and four spiky turrets, but the exterior was, in a sense at least, a happy accident – its design predicated by the carefully composed interior. Here, the high and handsome nave boasts an exquisite ceiling, whose fan-tail tracery is a complex geometry of extraordinary complexity and delicacy, as well as magnificent stained-glass windows. Paid for by Henry VIII, the glass was largely the work of Flemish glaziers, with the lower windows portraying scenes from the New Testament and the Apocrypha, and the upper windows the Old Testament. Above the altar hangs Rubens' tender Adoration of the Magi and an exhibition in the side chantries puts more historical flesh on Henry's grand plans.
King's is now one of the more progressive colleges, having been one of the first to admit women in 1972. Among its most famous alumni are E.M. Forster, who described his experiences in Maurice, film director Derek Jarman, poet Rupert Brooke and economist John Maynard Keynes.