Newnham College: A Tour

Newnham College and its surrounding lush, peaceful neighborhood was one of the reasons I wanted to end my 6-month pandemic hiatus and return to Cambridge for the fall. In a time when mobility is limited, this is a good place to be.

I didn’t necessarily know this when I submitted my application to the University of Cambridge with Newnham stated as my first choice of college. I hardly knew anything about the college system, except that I had been told it was a big part of a) Cambridge life and b) sources of funding. For a more in-depth explanation of the way 31 independent colleges can make up a single University, see this Cambridge primer. Briefly, though, every student and professor at Cambridge is a member of a college, faintly similar to a Hogwarts House. While undergraduates apply to and are admitted by their choice of college, graduate students are accepted by their department and simply state a preference for their college—even that is optional; they could be claimed by any college if they don’t specify. But I was looking for funding, and while some famous, wealthy colleges like Trinity and King’s have plenty of funding, graduate students aren’t always given their first choice of college and these are unlikely ones. So to narrow things down, I decided to choose from the (at the time) three women’s colleges at Cambridge—vestiges of the shockingly recent history of Cambridge when most colleges were male-only. Newnham College is the oldest remaining women’s college, founded in 1871, and thus has the biggest endowment and best bursaries. To be frank, this was the main reason I chose this college over the other two, Murray Edwards College and Lucy Cavendish College (which, incidentally, has just gone coed). However, in general, I also had certain romantic notions about elite historical women’s colleges—I had always wondered what it would have been like to go to Smith College or the like in the U.S. I knew this wasn’t exactly the same thing, but I still liked the feminist vibe I got from the website. (I did worry a bit about whether I would fit the image they were advertising—“Newnham’s tradition of producing strong, witty, and rebellious women”—but I liked it all the same.) Although I didn’t yet know much about Newnham’s incredible history, I did know that alumnae included Emma Thompson, Rosalind Franklin, Sylvia Plath, and Jane Goodall, and that it inspired Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. That was cool. I put Newnham down as my first choice and submitted the application.

When I found out I was accepted to Cambridge and Newnham and had funding secured—including some from Newnham, which I didn’t end up needing thanks to my other scholarship—Newnham became the center of my mental preparations to move. I signed up for college housing and spent a lot of time scrolling around the college grounds on Google Maps street view. There were patched-together 3D images of the garden and long, nondescript, seemingly endless corridors with old white paint and wallpaper. I could see an old brick church and a pub near where I was going to live, and cars on the left side of the road. Everything else was covered by trees.

So I wasn’t prepared for just how gorgeous my new home turned out to be. Newnham College is a Victorian fairyland. The stately collection of ivy-draped redbrick halls, Queen Anne style with their elaborate curly gables, white-trimmed windows, and copper turrets, is nearly in the center of Cambridge, just down the road from the River Cam and the Backs. The walls and hedges enclose a spacious spread of lawns (which you can walk on, unlike at some of the more traditional colleges with formal lawns; there are even clusters of weathered wooden picnic benches) and trees and lovingly landscaped flowerbeds. Near the heart is a sunken rose garden, a proper British jumble of blush and gold and cream, with vibrant purple salvia borders and a medallion of pond lilies at the center. On another lawn there’s a monument to a past college principal, a tall stone obelisk surrounded by hedges shaped into the college insignia (N intertwined with C) and starred with little white asters; this was one of the few things I had been able to make out from Google Maps. Now there in person, crunching along the gravel paths, I was especially taken with the nearby wild corner, as I thought of it, shadowy with trees and shrubs and a wildflower bed (starry and buttery with daffodils in the spring), where I later spotted many of my first British birds. The whole garden abounds with grey squirrels, no doubt to the gardeners’ chagrin, but their scurrying antics are undeniably adorable.

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Over time I’ve become familiar with the inside of the college. Here are some highlights:

Porter’s Lodge: this is the point of liaison between the college and the outside world (although Newnham is less controlling of who comes in and out relative to most city-center colleges), where visitors go for information, where students sign in and collect packages; porters also arrange fire drills and manage security cameras and many other things I’m sure. Across the hall is the Pigeonhole room, with a slot for every student (where in addition to normal mail, students often “pidge” things to each other). The Porter’s Lodge is in a shiny new wing of College that was finished shortly before I arrived, the Dorothy Garrod building, where a lot of other administrative offices are housed as well. (This is replicated in every college…epitome of Cambridge’s decentralization.)

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Iris Café: Down the hall in the Dorothy Garrod building is the shiny new café, named for the college flower, normally a bustling study and coffee hub by day and college bar by night. The ceiling is hung with whimsical metal casts of papers from Newnham archives.

Buttery: In the adjoining Sidwick Hall (the corridors are in fact nearly endless, the “second-longest continuous corridor in Britain”), the buttery is the cafeteria where students get their buffet-style meals, not half bad most of the time. Normally there’s an eating area full of chattering students, but these days it’s been transformed into a socially distanced queuing area (complete with a foot-pedal operated hand sanitizer station and NHS check-in QR code).

College Hall: Instead, students can eat in the College Hall, which with its vaulted ceilings and long tables is well situated for social distancing. In the days of pre-pandemic yore this room was reserved for Formal Hall dinners, where people come in their academic gowns and are served multi-course meals by candlelight, and for performances. It’s an exquisite room designed (like many of the other original buildings) by Basil Champneys in the 1880s, with an arching ceiling adorned with intricate filigreed plaster molding (I wish I had more vocabulary to describe this) and pale pink and blue paint, and floor-to-ceiling bay windows with wavy single-pane glass. At one end stand portraits of college founders, including Eleanor and Henry Sidgwick, a power couple if there ever was one, and Anne Jemima Clough. They saw the need for a route to higher education for women and founded Lectures for Ladies as an auxiliary to Cambridge in the 1870s (shortly after the first women’s college, Girton), starting with a single building and five determined students and growing from there, eventually becoming fully incorporated into Cambridge in 1948 (until which point women weren’t allowed full Cambridge degrees).

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College Library: Just as stunning as the hall, the library also has an arched, filigreed ceiling, this one powder blue and white, along with dark wood and staircases leading to the stacks—which are more well-endowed than most college libraries thanks to the fact that women weren’t allowed in the main University Library, duly noted by Viriginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. I don’t spend as much time in there as I should.

Pfeiffer Arch: The first Newnham building, now called Old Hall, once had a lane running in front of it all the way to the road on the other side of the present day college. As the college expanded, this lane was cut off at this arch. It houses the Clough Gates, with ornate iron filigree and Anne Jemima Clough’s coat of arms, and a wall of ivy that turns stunning crimson in the fall. The college put up with a disheartening amount of crap from the patriarchy, including male undergraduates who stormed these gates after a vote to grant women degrees failed in 1921 for a second time. Although they were granted degrees in 1948, women weren’t admitted to any of the previously all-male colleges until 1972 (besides a college founded as co-ed in 1964, Darwin College).

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MCR: In the Old Hall is the physical location of the MCR, or Middle Combination Room: the common room for graduate students, and also the term for the body of graduate students as a whole at Newnham (the undergraduates have/are the JCR for junior and the Fellows/professors have the SCR for senior). It’s a light and airy room with old wood floors and Persian carpets, more powder blue trim, assorted overstuffed couches, bay windows with window seats, a piano, a TV, and the trappings of a graduate student space: a bookshelf of feminist books, popular fiction, textbooks and board games; a cupboard for sexual health supplies; a kitchen with notices posted about cleaning up after yourself and supplies for wine and cheese nights; residual Christmas tinsel and grandfather clock with Christmas ornaments hanging off of it; leftover decor and supplies from a garden party stashed in corners; and the most entertaining touch, the wooden block letters of “NEWNHAM” on the hearth that are often rearranged to say “MEN NAWH.” The students who make up the MCR are a lovely bunch of women, diverse and supportive and energetic, a community I’m pleased to have joined. There may be questions about the place of women’s colleges in the 21^st century, but I think it’s an empowering space with a rich heritage it would be sad to leave entirely to the past.

Since I got back to Cambridge a few weeks ago, the beautiful spunky college has welcomed me with its fall-tinged verdure and birdsong and squirrel frolicking just like it did two years ago, and the women are back at their community-building despite the limits of the pandemic. It’s a good place to be.