General Editor's preface

Summary

At the outset of his Introduction, Peter Searby imagines a walk across Cambridge in the middle of the eighteenth century – a rapid walk, taking only fifteen minutes from Peterhouse to Jesus, yet taking in by the way how sixteen colleges comprised a university of only 700 undergraduates and 400 fellows. But on this walk we would have passed a whole series of amazing monuments – the great castle tower of Queens', King's chapel on the scale of a cathedral, the monumental libraries of Trinity and St John's. A careful observer walking this ground today will note that the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have contributed much, very much, to the face of Cambridge as we know it. In the 1710s and 1720s Hawksmoor planned a complete court at King's, of which the Gibbs Building of the 1720s is a more modest successor. From the same period the Senate House, by Gibbs and Burrough, is a fragment of a great design. In the early nineteenth century the idea of a major rebuilding of the Old Schools and the old University Library was revived, and of this the Cockerell Library was the fruit, a worthy successor to Wren's Library at Trinity. Meanwhile Wilkins himself conceived the idea of making a Regent Street out of Trinity Street and King's Parade, and the preposterous Mr Bankes, in 1824, proposed a variant of this obliterating the front of Caius to make way for the Fitzwilliam Museum.