England Guide
East Anglia
Trinity College
Opening time: College: daily 10am–5pm; Wren Library: Mon– Fri noon–2pm, plus Sat during term time 10.30am–12.30pm
Price: Nov– Feb free, but otherwise £2.20; Wren Library: free
Address: Trinity Street
Telephone: 01223/338 400
Website: www.trin.cam.ac.uk
Trinity College is the largest of the Cambridge colleges and has the largest courtyard. It comes as little surprise then that its list of famous alumni is probably longer than any of its rivals: literary greats, including Dryden, Byron, Tennyson and Vladimir Nabokov; the Cambridge spies Blunt, Burgess and Philby; two prime ministers, Balfour and Baldwin; William Thackeray, Isaac Newton, Vaughan Williams, Pandit Nehru, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and a trio of royals, Edward VII, George VI and Prince Charles.
A statue of Henry VIII, who founded the college in 1546, sits in majesty over Trinity's Great Gate, his sceptre replaced long ago with a chair leg by a student wit. Beyond lies the vast asymmetrical expanse of Great Court, which displays a fine range of Tudor buildings, the oldest of which is the fifteenth-century clocktower. The centrepiece of the court is a delicate fountain, in which, legend has it, Lord Byron used to bathe naked with his pet bear – the college forbade students from keeping dogs.
On the far side of the Great Court, "the screens" – a narrow passage separating the Hall from the kitchens – leads to Nevile's Court, where Newton first calculated the speed of sound. The west end of Nevile's Court is enclosed by one of the university's most famous buildings, the Wren Library. Viewed from the outside, it's impossible to appreciate the scale of the interior thanks to Wren's clever device of concealing the internal floor level by means of two rows of stone columns. In contrast to many modern libraries, natural light pours into the white stuccoed interior, which contrasts wonderfully with the dark lime-wood bookcases, also Wren-designed.