Cambridge, showcase for modernism (and how costly it is to fix)

The Pevsner architectural guides are around halfway through their revisions — though it is like the Forth Bridge, and soon it will be time for the revisions to be revised: it is 30 years since the new London: 2, for example. Aficionados have keenly awaited the Cambridgeshire volume, the latest in the series, because of the substantial new building undertaken by Cambridge University since Pevsner himself last catalogued it in the early 1970s (his first edition appeared in 1954). For most people the county is summarised by two buildings: Ely cathedral, ‘the ship of the fens’, and King’s College chapel. Both were admired by Pevsner, who reserved much of his disdain for Victorian buildings, and whose judgments about the 1960s architecture of the city seemed in some cases extravagant.

The volume covers the historic county: the Huntingdonshire revision, including buildings in the post-1974 administrative county, appeared earlier this year. Simon Bradley, the general editor of the series, has undertaken the revision of this important volume himself and observes of Cambridge that ‘no other English city outside London, Oxford not excepted, has achieved so much architecturally since 1945’.

The large amounts of patronage as the university expands, and the importance of the university’s architecture school, have made the city a field of intense competition among contemporary architectural practices, all of which seek to do their best. And nor is Cambridge any longer mainly the university: the effect of the proximity of it has stimulated a science park, research establishments, industry (especially technology) and extensive new housing for affluent clients, all of which have contributed to making the city an exhibition hall of modern architecture.

But this revision is also open about the faults of some modern architecture. New Court at Christ’s, built by Denys Lasdun in 1966–70, is termed an ‘arrogant intrusion’ on King Street, onto which it backs.