Leckhampton, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Leckhampton is the residential site for graduate students of Corpus Christi College of the University of Cambridge, England.[1][2] It consists of the late-19th-century Leckhampton House, the George Thomson Building, dating from the 1960s, and several other nearby houses. The buildings are set off Grange Road in the west of Cambridge amidst large, attractive gardens adjacent to Corpus's sports grounds, about fifteen minutes' walk from the main college site in Trumpington Street. Leckhampton has its own library, dining hall and bar; it forms the social as well as residential centre of Corpus graduate life. It also houses a number of fellows, both visiting and of Corpus.
Removed from the city centre, yet close to many academic buildings including the University Library and the Sidgwick Site, Leckhampton is in a convenient location for graduate students, and was a pioneering development among Cambridge colleges when it was established as a graduate centre. Prior to this, graduate students at Cambridge, long a tiny minority of the student body, had for the most part lived among undergraduates in colleges' main sites. Corpus's response to the rapidly growing number of graduate students in the 1960s was to establish at Leckhampton a largely self-contained graduate community, a move which has since been emulated to some extent by many other colleges. Although at least one of these developments went much further than Leckhampton – Clare College's graduate site became the independent college of Clare Hall in 1984. Since the separation of Clare and Clare Hall, it is once again unique among the colleges that admit both undergraduates and postgraduates in having a dedicated graduate site.
[edit] History
Leckhampton House had been designed by the architect William C. Marshall in 1881 to its first inhabitants, Frederic William Henry Myers and Eveleen Myers (née Tennant). Frederic Myers was a classical schollar, poet, essayist and founder of the Society for Psychical Research. Eveleen Myers was a talented amateur photographer whose collection is exposed at National Portrait Gallery, including many photographs of Leckhampton House in the late 19th.,[3][4]
In contrast to Leckhampton House's suburban late-Victorianism, the George Thomson Building (named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist George Paget Thomson, sometime master of the college) is an example of postwar modernism. Like other buildings of its kind on University campuses, some have criticised it as unimaginative, boxy and out of place. Others, however, have hailed it as an outstanding example for the period. Certainly, from some angles, the building seems to float above the lawns of the campus, and it is particularly striking at night. The other buildings of Leckhampton are late-nineteenth-century houses in the adjacent streets which have been bought by the college over the years and linked to the main buildings and gardens.
