St John's College, Cambridge

• 1. Introduction

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  St John's College, Cambridge, has hosted a monarch on horseback inside its own dining hall. In 1564, Queen Elizabeth brought her horse into the hall during a state visit to Cambridge. That scene sits oddly next to the college's other reputation, five centuries of producing prime ministers, archbishops and Nobel laureates. Twelve Nobel Prizes, seven prime ministers and twelve archbishops have passed through its gates, alongside at least two princes and three saints. Behind the numbers is a stranger story about how the college came to exist at all. How does a religious hospital become the second wealthiest college at Cambridge? Who kept its founding alive when everything seemed to work against it? And why does its fiercest rival have no staircase marked with the letter J?

• 2. From Hospital To College

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  Around 1200, the Hospital of St John the Evangelist opened on the site that now holds the college chapel, caring for Cambridge's sick. By 1470, the university's chancellor, Thomas Rotherham, granted the hospital full membership privileges, and it became known as St John's House. Within a few decades the hospital had fallen into disrepair, its finances close to collapse.

  Lady Margaret Beaufort had already endowed Christ's College. Her chaplain, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, then suggested she found a second college on the hospital's site. She died without ever mentioning St John's in her will. It fell to Fisher alone to carry the plan forward. He needed approval from King Henry VIII, from the Pope through the intermediary Polydore Vergil, and from the Bishop of Ely. The Bishop had to agree to suppress a hospital that, by then, held only a Master and three Augustinian brethren.

  The college received its charter on the 9th of April 1511. Extracting the money from Lady Margaret's estate proved slower. A codicil was not obtained in the Archbishop of Canterbury's court until the 22nd of October 1512. The Court of Chancery did not clear her executors to pay for the foundation until that November. Most of the old hospital buildings were beyond repair, though the executors saved the chapel and folded it into the new college. They added a kitchen, a hall, and a gate tower built to house the College Treasury. Every evening at dusk, the doors were shut, sealing the community inside.

  In 2011, exactly five hundred years after its charter, the college celebrated its quincentenary. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, attended the celebration.

• 3. Courts, Halls And A Chapel

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  The Great Gate greets visitors first, crenellated and carved with the arms of the foundress, Lady Margaret Beaufort. Above the arms sit her badges, the Red Rose of Lancaster and the Portcullis, flanked by yales, mythical beasts with elephants' tails and goats' heads. A statue of St John the Evangelist stands above them in a tabernacle, an eagle at his feet and a poisoned chalice in his hands. First Court itself was built between 1511 and 1520, on the footprint of the old hospital. Its south range was refaced in the Georgian style between 1772 and 1776 by the local architect James Essex. Parts of First Court were used as a prison in 1643, during the English Civil War.

  In the 1860s, the college demolished its medieval chapel and rebuilt the entire north range of First Court. Sir George Gilbert Scott designed the new chapel, which still holds pieces salvaged from the old one. It is the third tallest building in Cambridge. The rebuilding forced the college to enlarge its dining hall with an extra bay window and add a new building beside the Great Gate.

  The dining hall's hammerbeam roof is painted black and gold and decorated with the coats of arms of the college's benefactors. Its linenfold panelling dates from 1528 to 1529, topped by a hexagonal louvre added in 1703. Scott extended the hall from five to eight bays in 1863, and its two bay windows hold heraldic glass spanning the 15th to 19th centuries.

  Second Court, built between 1598 and 1602, is often called the finest Tudor court in England. The Countess of Shrewsbury financed its construction, and her statue still stands above the court's western gatehouse, added in 1671. Behind an oriel window in the north range once ran the Long Gallery, a promenading room 148 feet long before it was divided. There, England and France signed the treaty settling the marriage of King Charles I to Queen Henrietta Maria. In the 1940s, parts of the D-Day landings were planned in that same gallery.

  The Old Library was built in 1624, funded largely by John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln. Williams gave 1,200 pounds anonymously toward the project before revealing his identity. He ultimately donated 2,011 pounds of the library's 3,000-pound total cost. Its bay window overlooking the River Cam bears the letters ILCS, short for Iohannes Lincolniensis Custos Sigilli, meaning John of Lincoln, Keeper of the Seal. Williams rejected the college's original classical design in favor of a traditional one, making the library an early example of English neo-Gothic architecture.

  Third Court is entered through Shrewsbury Tower, which housed an observatory from 1765 to 1859. Its final ranges were completed between 1669 and 1672, once the college had recovered from the trauma of civil war. Among the additions is a window with nothing behind it, built solely to visually connect the windowed library to the rest of the court.

  When the college decided in 1861 that First Court needed a larger chapel, it again chose Sir George Gilbert Scott as architect. Scott had just finished the chapel at Exeter College, Oxford, and drew on the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris for his new design at St John's. The benefactor Henry Hoare offered a 3,000-pound downpayment toward the chapel. He promised 1,000 pounds a year more if Scott would add a tower to his original plan for a small flèche. Hoare then died in a railway accident, leaving the college 3,000 pounds short of the promised funds. The tower was still completed, modeled on Pershore Abbey and reaching 163 feet high, though it was left without bells.

  Inside stand statues of Lady Margaret Beaufort and John Fisher, in the chapel's antechamber. An ante-chapel holds a Deposition of the Cross by Anton Rafael Mengs, painted around 1777. The misericords and panelling date from 1516, saved from the original medieval chapel. Most of the stained glass was cast around 1869 by the firms Clayton and Bell, Hardman, and Wailes, though some 15th-century glass survives. The tower could once be climbed, until repairs to its pinnacles and roof closed the access in 2016.

  The Master's Lodge sits north of Third Court, built alongside the new chapel. It is fitted with Tudor relics rescued from the demolished north wing of First Court. Its westmost rooms look out over the old library and the river. A bridge would later rise there, one the college had not yet built when the lodge went up.

• 4. Bridges And Newer Courts

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  Sir Christopher Wren submitted designs for the college's first stone bridge. It was ultimately built on a different site, by the local mason Robert Grumbold. Grumbold based his work on Wren's designs, and the crossing became known as the Wren Bridge. Grumbold also built the library at Trinity College.

  Downstream stands the crossing most visitors remember, originally named New Bridge. It is now called the Bridge of Sighs, despite bearing little resemblance to its Venetian namesake. Queen Victoria, visiting the college, called it "so pretty and picturesque." Its architect, Henry Hutchinson, gave it a single stone span and a covered, traceried footwalk in the Neo-Gothic style. It remains one of the most photographed buildings in Cambridge.

  Thomas Rickman and Henry Hutchinson designed New Court, built between 1826 and 1831 to house the college's growing number of students. The college had originally wanted a copy of Second Court. It accepted a fashionably Gothic design instead, partly to rival the neo-Gothic screen King's College was already building under the architect William Wilkins. Its fan-vaulted main portal echoes the ceiling of Bishop Alcock's 15th-century chapel at Ely Cathedral. Its dramatic, tiered profile, especially when seen from the river, earned New Court the nickname "The Wedding Cake."

  West of the modern Cripps Building stands the School of Pythagoras, built around 1200 and older than the college itself by three hundred years. It is both the oldest secular building in Cambridge and the oldest building still used continuously by any British university. From 1266 until 1959, the building belonged to Merton College, Oxford, alongside the neighboring Merton Hall.

  Rising student numbers in the 1930s led the college to build Chapel Court, North Court, and Forecourt, all designed by the architect Edward Maufe. After the Second World War, demand for accommodation grew again, and the Cripps Building went up in the late 1960s behind New Court. Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya designed the building, named for its benefactor Humphrey Cripps and listed Grade II*. It later underwent a full refurbishment in 2014, including the cleaning of its Portland stone.

  The Fisher Building, named after Cardinal John Fisher, was completed in 1987 to designs by the architect Peter Boston. It added teaching rooms and a student-run cinema. Opposite the Great Gate stands the All Saints' Yard complex. It emerged from a renovation of the so-called Triangle Site, finished in Michaelmas Term 2012 at a cost of about 9.75 million pounds. Its centerpiece, Corfield Court, is named after the project's chief benefactor, Charles Corfield. The site also includes the School of Divinity, built between 1878 and 1879 by Basil Champneys. It reverted fully to St John's when the university's divinity faculty relocated in 2000.

  By the time all this was finished, Merton Court had become the college's eleventh and westernmost court.

• 5. People Who Passed Through

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  Paul Dirac won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933, cited for "the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory." Frederick Sanger won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice. He first won it in 1958, for his work on the structure of insulin. He won it again in 1980, for determining the base sequences of nucleic acids. Max Born, Abdus Salam and Maurice Wilkins each also won Nobel Prizes, in physics, physics, and physiology or medicine respectively. Roger Penrose received the most recent one, in 2020, for showing that black hole formation is a robust prediction of general relativity.

  Henry John Temple, the 3rd Viscount Palmerston, served two separate terms as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He held office from 1855 to 1858, and again from 1859 to 1865. George Hamilton-Gordon, the 4th Earl of Aberdeen, held the office from 1852 to 1855. In 2004, Manmohan Singh became Prime Minister of India, a post he held until 2014. St John's also produced two prime ministers of New Zealand, Alfred Domett and Sir Francis Bell.

  William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson both studied at St John's before leading the movement that ended slavery within the British Empire. Two more Johnians, Thomas Gisborne and Thomas Babington, served alongside them on the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Those efforts culminated in the Slave Trade Act of 1807. On the 16th of February 2007, Brown University's president, Ruth J. Simmons, gave a public lecture at St John's, part of the Act's bicentenary commemorations. Simmons, herself a descendant of American slaves, spoke on slavery and justice in Rhode Island.

  Prince William joined the college in 2014 for a university-run course in estate management. Decades earlier, the poet William Wordsworth had walked the same courts as an undergraduate.

  More than a thousand former members of St John's appear in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

• 6. A Choir Split In Two

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  The Choir of St John's College has sung daily services in the chapel since the 1670s, following the Church of England's cathedral tradition. Evensong is sung six days a week during term, with a Sung Eucharist on Sunday mornings. Since 2023, the choir has been directed by Christopher Gray, previously choirmaster and organist at Truro Cathedral. Its choristers are educated and boarded at St John's College School. During university vacations the choir tours abroad, with recent trips to the Netherlands, the United States and Japan.

  The choir's discography stretches back to the 1950s, when it first signed to the Decca/Argo label under the direction of George Guest. It has since recorded for Hyperion Records and Chandos Records, earning a Gramophone Editor's Choice for its 2015 collection The Call. In 2016, the choir signed to Signum Records under its own St John's College imprint. It launched with a collection of Jonathan Harvey's music that reached number two on the UK specialist classical chart.

  In October 2021, the college announced that girls and women would join the Choir of St John's College. It became the first Oxbridge college choir to combine male and female voices among both adults and children. A separate all-female group, St John's Voices, had already existed since 2013. It gave women in the college a chance to sing in a college choir of their own. It grew to about 30 members and premiered three works. In March 2024, the college gave written notice that it would disband the group by that June.

  Members of St John's Voices fought the decision. They published an open letter that called the decision "regressive." The letter said the admission of women into the main choir had been "weaponised against the very existence of another ensemble." The letter drew coverage from The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Independent. Supporters included the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the conductor Sir Simon Rattle, the mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly, and the composer John Rutter.

• 7. Rivalries, Ghosts And Swans

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  Henry VIII founded Trinity College only after ordering the execution of John Fisher, the very man whose efforts had founded St John's. The two colleges remain fierce rivals in sport and in academic rankings, and legend has attached itself to the grudge. One popular story claims Trinity's older courts avoid a staircase marked with the letter J, out of spite toward St John's. The more likely explanation is that the Latin alphabet had no letter J. Two small cannons on Trinity's bowling green are said to point toward St John's. The eagle above the entrance to New Court is said to have been carved looking away from its rival, though both may be coincidence. Despite the grudge, the colleges can be genuinely friendly. In 1932, Ernest Walton of Trinity and John Cockcroft of St John's split the atomic nucleus together. The work later brought Cockcroft a share of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics.

  New Court's central cupola displays four blank clock faces, and legend explains them several ways. One tale claims a Cambridge statute once capped the number of chiming clocks in the city, though no such law is known to exist. A rival explanation credits the architect Henry Hutchinson with wanting to protect the building's symmetry. Others point to the college's tight finances in the early 19th century. Other legends claim St John's and Trinity raced to build the last chiming clock in Cambridge. One version says Trinity's tower was quietly heightened overnight to win. In truth, the two towers were built nearly two centuries apart. Trinity's clock was installed in the 17th century by its Master, Richard Bentley, a former St John's student. It chimes once for Trinity and once for his old college.

  St John's fellows are said to be the only people outside the British royal family permitted to eat unmarked mute swans. The Crown shares ownership of the Thames's unmarked swans with the Vintners' Company and the Dyers' Company, a right granted in the 15th century. The King only exercises it on certain stretches of the river.

  In 1706, four fellows claimed to have "exorcised" ghosts from a house opposite the college, firing pistols toward the sounds of unexplained moaning. Second Court is said to be haunted by a former undergraduate and master, James Wood. He was too poor to light his own room, and did his studying on a well-lit staircase instead.

  The college's Old French motto, souvent me souvient, was Lady Margaret Beaufort's own. It means both "often I remember" and, spoken aloud, "I often pass beneath it," a pun on the inscriptions carved above its gates. That inscription still sits over gates, lintels and tympana across the college, waiting for anyone willing to look up and notice it.

• 8. Sport, Scholarships And The Ball

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  Every undergraduate and graduate at St John's is guaranteed on-site accommodation, often in "sets" of shared living and sleeping rooms for two students. Members can dine formally in the Hall, with silver service three-course meals six evenings a week, or eat more casually in the buttery. Undergraduates belong to the Junior Combination Room. Graduate students hold membership in both the JCR and the Samuel Butler Room, the college's Middle Combination Room.

  The Samuel Butler Room traces its founding to 1960, when graduate students applied to the College Council for separation from the Junior Combination Room. It takes its name from the Johnian author and polymath Samuel Butler, after whom its physical rooms were named.

  The Tompkins Table ranks Cambridge colleges by degree results every year. St John's typically lands near the middle, averaging a position of 12.8 since 1997. In 2022, though, it ranked 6th of 29 colleges, with more than 35 per cent of its students earning first-class honours.

  Roger Lupton, Provost of Eton, died in 1540. He was the college's most generous early benefactor, funding scholarships that survive today as the Lupton and Hebblethwaite Exhibitions. Graduate scholarships also include the Craik, the J.C. Hall, the Paskin and the Pelling, open to students from any country in any graduate subject. The Adams Prize in mathematics honors John Couch Adams, the Johnian who discovered Neptune, and is awarded annually to a UK-resident mathematician under 40. The college also funds the Dr Manmohan Singh Scholarship, first awarded in 2008, and a McMahon Law Studentship for students pursuing legal qualifications. Winners of the Larmor Award, named for the former student Sir Joseph Larmor, receive handcrafted silverware alongside a cash prize. Recent recipients include the actor Jonah Hauer-King and the violinist Julia Hwang.

  The Lady Margaret Boat Club, founded in 1825, is the oldest rowing club in the university. The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race tradition itself began with one of its students. Its historic rival, Trinity's boat club, is known as "First and Third" after the two original clubs it grew from.

  St John's hockey club counted over 50 active members as of 2024 and won the Division One League title every year from 2019 to 2024. The Red Boys, the college's rugby club, won nine consecutive Division One League titles before losing to Jesus College in the 2010-11 season. The club also took the Cuppers trophy six years running, from 2006 to 2011. Since 2014 the club has added five more Cuppers trophies, most recently in 2025 against St Catherine's-Homerton. It has also won three League Shields and the first-ever Sevens Shield in 2016-17, a season in which the Redboys went undefeated. Alumni of the rugby club include the former RFU executive Francis Baron and the England and Lions fly-half Rob Andrew. Another is the actor Jamie Bamber, known for Battlestar Galactica.